With our annual OS reviews out of the way, Federico and I will be covering our favorite indie apps that take advantage of Apple’s latest OS features. We have hundreds to draw from and instead of one big sweeping roundup, we’re going to do a bunch of smaller ones as we work our way through our lists.

To start with, we have six excellent apps that make use of Siri AI, Apple Intelligence, extra-large widgets, and more. There’s a lot of innovation packed into this group, so let’s dive into the details, and check back soon for more roundups.

Just as I was heading into the final stretch of review season, TestFlight was updated to reverse an update I wrote about in July. That update added search, which was one of my longstanding wishes for TestFlight. However, for some users, the update also changed the sorting of betas from reverse chronological order to alphabetical, including active betas alongside expired ones. As someone who reviews a lot of apps, that made TestFlight barely usable.

With the latest update, I’m happy to report that the sorting order has been restored to reverse chronological order. The most recently updated betas appear at the top of the list, and when you want to find something older, search is a great option. Returning to reverse chronological order may seem like a small thing, but it’s made a world of difference in keeping up with the apps I test.

Search was near the top of my list of TestFlight wishes for years, and its addition made a meaningful difference to the app’s usability. But I’ve had a lot of TestFlight wishes over the years that are scattered across multiple articles, so I thought I’d share what else I’d like Apple to tackle with TestFlight:

• Performance. I test a lot of apps, which slows TestFlight down on every Apple platform. The issue isn’t as severe today as it was when I wrote about it in 2023, but the slowness is still bad enough to make the app hard to use. Whatever the issue is, I’d love to see the list loading time reduced and scrolling through a list of apps become as smooth as it is in the App Store.
• Add filtering, sorting, and folders. Search is a step in the right direction, but allow me to sort by date, developer, category, and other metadata. I’d also like to be able to filter by installation status, so I can just see the betas I’ve installed or haven’t installed yet. User-defined folders for organization would be a nice bonus too.
• Hide inactive and expired betas. I’ve thought about TestFlight’s expired betas section a lot and can’t think of a single reason it exists from a tester’s perspective. Let me hide or exclude expired and withdrawn betas.
• Fix TestFlight emails and automatic updates. TestFlight email notifications can only be turned on or off on a per-beta basis. Adding a global switch would help a lot with managing these messages. Also, automatic updates of betas have never worked on my iPhone, and I’ve talked to others who have the same problem.
• Restore usable betas after a device migration. Apple’s migration from one device to another has gotten much better over the years, but it still does not migrate TestFlight betas, leaving me with a bunch of broken apps on my iPhone every fall.
• Indicate when a beta has been released on the App Store. This strikes me as easy to request, though I’m sure is difficult to implement, but I’d love to know when a beta has been superseded by an App Store version, so I can grab the stable release if I want and know I can publish a review about an app without having to check the App Store repeatedly myself.

The bottom line is that while TestFlight is once again usable, it could be much better. I recognize that TestFlight isn’t an app used by most people, but like Apple’s own OS beta testing program, TestFlight betas are an important part of developers’ workflow. They provide QA feedback and a promotional channel that the friction encountered by TestFlight users undermines.

I’m glad TestFlight continues to get meaningful updates. I just hope it gets more attention going forward.

I haven’t been this excited about an Apple Watch in a long time. Last week, Apple introduced the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4, which will be available at the end of the week. The new Watches feature the S11 chip, which enables a bunch of new features, some of which won’t debut until later this year. At the same time, Apple is dropping support for more Watches than usual.

What we’re witnessing is a reboot of the Apple Watch and watchOS forced by advances in AI. The Apple Watch and its OS found their niche years ago, freeing us from pulling out our iPhones for notifications, tracking our health and fitness, and enabling the occasional Siri request. It was a good and comfortable spot for what by all accounts has been one of the most successful wearables to date, but watchOS also felt stuck in a rut.

Every year we got a few new workout types, a new watch face, and a few other features, but the OS didn’t advance much. What’s different this year is that watchOS 27 is breaking with slower hardware and looking forward to the substantially more powerful S11 chip, which will allow the Apple Watch to expand into all-new areas.

What this transition also means is that there is not just one set of features to track in watchOS 27 this year but three:

• those that arrive today for anyone with a compatible Apple Watch,
• those that arrive at the end of the week that are exclusive to the new Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, and
• those that are coming later this year.

That makes this more than just a review. It’s also a preview of things to come and a roadmap for where the Apple Watch is heading.

There’s more than usual to cover this year, so let’s dive in and check it out.

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Interface, Navigation, and the Smart Stack

I like Liquid Glass on all of Apple’s devices and didn’t have any issues with its first iteration in watchOS 26. However, with the latest update, my Apple Watch Ultra 3’s UI is ever so slightly more readable. Smart Stack suggestions and notifications don’t bleed through each other as much, and app icons are sharper.

On a small screen like an Apple Watch, you may never notice the difference, but there’s a sharpness throughout the UI that’s reminiscent of the sharpness you see in app icons on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Edges are more defined and colors are diffused less, making everything a little crisper. It’s a subtle change, but a good one.

The watchOS 27 change most users will notice first is the change to the way you navigate through the OS’s UI. The App Switcher is gone, replaced by the simpler Dynamic App Grid. And although I expect the App Switcher will be missed by some, I don’t miss it at all. Sure, it was a little hard to break the Digital Crown double-press habit at first, but as someone who returns to the same handful of apps repeatedly, I find the new design makes more sense.

Before watchOS 27, the App Switcher was invoked with a double press of the Digital Crown. That revealed a Rolodex-style view of your recent apps that you could move among by turning the Digital Crown. The UI served as a shortcut between frequently used apps that avoided returning to the app grid or list views on your Watch, which can be crowded if you have a lot of apps installed.

Now, whether you single- or double-press the Digital Crown, the new Dynamic App Grid appears. At its center is the new Siri app. Below that is the icon to take you to the app list or grid view depending on how your Watch is set up. Apple says that the remaining five icons that circle the Siri icon are placed based on recency and frequency of use.

I’ve been using watchOS 27 all summer, and my recently used apps have barely changed. Currently, those apps include Settings, Alarms, News, Maps, and Moshi, an app I use for monitoring AI agent projects.

I don’t think I’m alone in being a creature of habit when it comes to the Apple Watch apps I use. Having those five apps just one Digital Crown press away is far easier than pressing twice, scrolling to find what I want, and then tapping into an app. Between the Dynamic App Grid and the expanded Smart Stack, there are plenty of ways to get to the apps you use the most, which I love. What the Dynamic App Grid gives up in predictability is more than made up for by the simpler gesture and UI.

watchOS 27 adds a new single tap gesture for selection, which allows you to do a lot more simply with gestures. For example, a double tap gesture with your thumb and index finger opens the Smart Stack to the first card. Double tap again to move to the next card or, if a card has multiple items that can be selected, to the next item on the card. Once what you want is selected, a single tap will open it. The existing wrist flick gesture is then used to return to the watch face.

The Smart Stack is now stacked with more types of cards, too. Apple has added cards for birthdays stored in Contacts, your car’s parking location, a prompt to change an alarm before a holiday, a shortcut to resume a Siri conversation, transit card balances, pinned Messages conversations, Theater Mode, and more. It’s a nice expansion that has made my Smart Stack feel more useful all summer because there’s always something relevant to me there.

The other change announced just last week is the addition of the Siri Modular face, which I immediately installed on my Apple Watch Ultra 3. The watch face displays the top Smart Stack item in a large complication in the middle of your Watch. It’s a nice touch, but because you can’t dismiss the media playback card without turning off Live Activities, that one has wound up on my watch face more frequently than I’d like. Still, when an app like Moshi reports that an AI agent’s task has been completed, it’s nice to be able to see a snippet of the message directly on my watch face. It also strikes me as a great way to keep track of tasks with a deadline from task manager apps like this review’s sponsor, Finalist.

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So, on balance, I like what Apple has done with watchOS 27’s navigation. The Dynamic App Grid takes a little getting used to, but I appreciate its simplicity. The Smart Stack, single tap gesture, and new Siri Modular watch face combine to make the Smart Stack more useful than ever too. Watch interactions are meant to be short, and watchOS 27 nails that goal.

Siri AI and the Apple Watch as Helper

Siri AI is a big part of watchOS 27 just like it is on every Apple platform (except tvOS) this year. As on those other platforms, Siri has a dedicated app on the Watch. The main difference is in how you interact with Siri. On macOS, iOS, and iPadOS, you can speak or type queries in the Siri app. On watchOS 27, the app accepts spoken queries only. That struck me as a little strange at first given that Apple offers multiple ways to input text on watchOS, but the reality is chatbot queries are typically longer than a dashed-off text message, so in practice, the lack of text input is fine.

Siri AI requires an Apple Watch Series 9 or later, Ultra 2 or later, or SE 3, along with a nearby iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence: an iPhone 15 Pro, 15 Pro Max, or any iPhone 16 or later model. It’s being released as a beta, initially in English only, and won’t be available in the EU for the time being. Apple also says it will introduce usage limits for Siri AI in the future. Those limits will vary depending on factors such as request complexity and system demand. Increased access will be available for a fee. To make a Siri request, you can tap an installed complication, long-press the Digital Crown, or say “Siri” or “Hey Siri.” Once you start a chat with Siri, it retains the context, allowing you to ask follow-up questions without restating everything.

Alternatively, you can open the app where you can see your past chats. The app’s button to start a conversation accepts spoken input only. Type to Siri remains available through Accessibility settings, but it’s a separate way to invoke Siri rather than a text-entry option within the app.

Your query list includes any requests you’ve made on your Apple Watch or any other Apple device, all synced via iCloud. In my experience, sync is fast over a good network connection with chats appearing on my Mac seconds after a response is delivered to my Watch. From the Siri Apple Watch app, you can also swipe left on an entry to delete or pin it, or tap the entry to read it.

Siri AI on the Apple Watch also offers the same personal-context capabilities that let it find information in your email, photos, tasks, and notes and use it to take action in apps. I explored those capabilities and their shortcomings in my macOS Golden Gate review. My experience on the Watch hasn’t been meaningfully different, apart from occasional minor latency, so that review is the best place to dig into my testing.

What changes here is the convenience of having those capabilities on your wrist within easy reach. The nearby iPhone supplies the connection to Apple Intelligence, but the Watch is both the immediate interface and, for many requests, the place where the resulting action occurs.

It’s also worth stepping back to think about what Siri could do before. I rarely used Siri for more than setting timers and alarms, checking the weather, and controlling my lights. However, now, I can tell Siri to remind me to take out the trash tomorrow morning and add a calendar event for a dinner reservation in one breath. That’s not wildly complex stuff, but it’s very convenient, especially when your iPhone is in your pocket or across the room and you think of something you need to do. Siri also has the same broad world knowledge that it does on other Apple devices, allowing you to check recent sports scores, check the news, and answer questions about the world around you.

Not every technology advance needs to be a monumental leap forward. Sometimes the simplest, most convenient small thing has the greatest impact. Siri on the Apple Watch has that potential, although with time, I’d like to see it become independent of the iPhone.

Workouts and Fitness

I’m happy to be the one who gets to tell you that Workout Buddy has been freed from the requirement that you carry your iPhone with you. Users tend to love or hate Workout Buddy. Personally, I love it. Sure, its incredibly chipper voice can grate if you’re heading out for a long walk and aren’t feeling it, but that’s sort of the point. Once enabled, Workout Buddy is there to encourage you with no judgment. It’ll tell you you’re below your average targets with the same cheerfulness as when you’re crushing it.

When Workout Buddy debuted, my disappointment wasn’t with its voice, personality, or the information it offers. My issue was that the time I need a pep talk when exercising is when I’m out on a long run by myself suffering in the summer heat. The problem is that until watchOS 27, Workout Buddy was only available if you had your iPhone with you. That was fine when I went on a long walk, and I’m sure many cyclists were fine, but one of the reasons I got an Apple Watch was to never lug an iPhone with me while I ran, especially an iPhone like my iPhone 17 Pro Max.

With watchOS 27, I’m pleased to report that Workout Buddy works as well over a Wi-Fi or cellular connection as it does tethered to your iPhone and is compatible with walking, running, cycling, hiking, elliptical, stair stepper, HIIT, and functional and traditional strength training. Workout Buddy speaks Mexican Spanish now, too. In fact, it’s an Apple Intelligence feature that works without your iPhone nearby, which gives me hope for more iPhone-independent Apple Intelligence features in future releases.

Workout Buddy also offers more insights about your workout by comparing pace, distance, and workout duration to your recent fitness history. Today, just before I wrote this section, I went for a walk to get some fresh air and was cheerfully told how little I’ve exercised during this crazy iPhone event and OS review writing week. What I appreciate most, though, is that overall, Workout Buddy isn’t significantly more chatty. I don’t want it to turn into a podcast; I just want brief, periodic updates, which it delivers well.

The Workout app’s scrolling has been improved too. I know a lot of people who felt it was too easy to scroll past their intended workout type. That’s generally not a problem for me since I only use a few workout types, but even then, I sometimes overshot my mark. With watchOS 27, there’s a little less momentum built into the scrolling. Even if I swipe as fast as I can muster, I can only manage to move five workouts. A normal, calm swipe advances me just one workout.

Additional Workout and Fitness improvements include:

• more precise post-workout route maps, which, based on my walks and runs, have been very accurate whether I’m among buildings, under trees, or out in the open,
• more accurate measurement of treadmill distances, which I haven’t tried personally, and
• step counts in the Fitness app that now synchronize with those recorded in Health.

There may not be many changes to the workout and fitness features of the Apple Watch in watchOS 27, but I’m nonetheless pleased that I’ve been able to turn on Workout Buddy for my morning runs to help motivate and inform me about my progress.

Apps, Services, and Everyday Improvements

Find My

It never made sense to me that different aspects of the iPhone’s Find My were spread across separate apps on the Apple Watch. I suppose the idea was that splitting the app up made it more atomic and widget-like for the Apple Watch’s small screen, but in practice, I think most people use Find My from an iPhone more than they do an Apple Watch, so the split on the Apple Watch was confusing.

The new Find My app is map-based, just like it is on other platforms. The app defaults to a devices view, and if you have multiple devices with Find My enabled in one location, you can scroll among them using the Digital Crown. Tap the button in the top left corner and you can switch from devices to people or items.

What I love about the new Find My is how true it is to the iPhone app. You’re able to use it to get directions, contact someone, play a sound on a device or item, enable Notify When Found or Notify When Left Behind, set arrival and departure alerts for people, mark devices and items as lost, and use Precision Finding with the iPhone and second-generation AirTag. Precision Finding requires a Series 9 or later or Ultra 2 or later, and locating an iPhone requires a compatible model with Ultra Wideband. Find My is no companion Watch app. It’s the real deal.

Wallet

iOS 27 adds the ability to create passes in the Wallet app. The new feature makes it easy to add library, loyalty, and gym cards that use a barcode or QR code to Wallet even when a service doesn’t offer a Wallet pass. With “Create a Pass,” you no longer need to carry physical cards.

Setting up a pass is easy. From the Wallet app on your iPhone, tap the plus button and choose “Create a Pass.” The next screen explains that you can set up a pass automatically by photographing it or manually by typing in the information yourself. I’ve used the automatic approach with our local supermarket’s loyalty card and one my wife has for Barnes & Noble. Wallet picked up the relevant information from both cards right away. I haven’t tried the Barnes & Noble card, but the card for our supermarket worked perfectly the last time I bought groceries.

The functionality extends to watchOS 27, too. Although you can’t make passes with the Apple Watch’s Wallet app, they appear there the same way cards from other apps are collected there. Tap on a pass in the Wallet app and it expands to show the membership number and name, followed by a barcode, more pass details, and buttons to share the pass with someone or remove it from Wallet. There are third-party apps that do something similar, but for the limited number of cards I have that aren’t already tied to an app or Wallet pass from that app, the new pass generation feature and its integration with watchOS 27 are exactly what I need. On the iPhone, you can also edit a pass’s details and customize its appearance, making your passes easier to tell apart.

Other Apps and Features

Phone:

Call Context is a Phone feature that’s available on both the iPhone and Apple Watch that can surface relevant information from Mail during a call, such as flight details when you call an airline. I haven’t had many opportunities to try this over the summer, but it did pull up a flight for me on my iPhone when I called American Airlines about a flight. I called back later from my Apple Watch Ultra 3, but that time, the flight details didn’t appear.

Shazam:

With watchOS 27, Shazam can listen to music even if your Apple Watch isn’t connected to the Internet and send its acoustic signature to the cloud for analysis and matching when your connectivity resumes. This is not on-device song recognition, but it does mean you can still track a song in the moment and get the results later, which I like.

Unused Feature Notifications:

watchOS 27 proactively sends notifications that it will turn off unused features, such as gestures, Start Workout reminders, and Raise to Speak, to preserve your Watch’s battery life. If you get one of these notifications, you can decline it or turn the feature back on later in Settings. I haven’t seen any of these notifications during my summer testing.

Cycle Tracking:

watchOS 27’s Cycle Tracking expands support to perimenopause and menopause, including symptom logging and educational resources. For anyone 40 and older, changes in logged cycle patterns may prompt a notification suggesting a consultation with their doctor. Apple makes it clear that the notifications the Apple Watch provides aren’t meant to be a diagnosis, but a way of recognizing a pattern that the user may want to raise with their doctor.

Screen Time:

Apple has also redesigned Screen Time controls to help families manage a child’s Apple Watch use, including contact restrictions, app schedules, and app access. I don’t manage any of my grown kids’ devices, so I haven’t tested these updates.

Performance

My experience with watchOS 27 has been a lot like my experience with macOS Golden Gate. The performance enhancements touted by Apple at WWDC are real, but soon become the new normal. I also have just my one Apple Watch to go by, so I’ll share my anecdotal experience with the betas.

My Apple Watch Ultra 3 already had one of the fastest chips available in an Apple Watch, but the performance of watchOS 27 was still noticeably faster from the very first time I installed developer beta 1. That experience is as true today as it was then, but I’m more used to it now. Apps launch faster and more smoothly, and transitions between in-app views are better too. The changes are relatively subtle, but nonetheless noticeable, which I appreciate.

The biggest difference of all, though, has been my experience with Apple Music, Podcasts, and Books. All three apps load content and start playing it faster than before. I’ve also had less trouble connecting both my Powerbeats Fit earbuds that I use for exercising and my AirPods Pro 3. That’s ended a whole connection and playback dance I used to do every time I got ready to go for a jog, which has been wonderful to leave behind.

What I didn’t notice was better battery life. That’s not to say it isn’t better, but with the frequency of beta updates over the summer and my habit of periodically charging my Watch at my desk, battery life seemed about the same as watchOS 26.

Odds and Ends

In addition to what I’ve already covered, it’s worth noting the following changes:

• The Walkie-Talkie has been removed. I don’t think it was used by many people.
• Apple says water detection is more efficient, though in what way is unclear.
• GymKit has been extended to the iPhone with AirPods Pro 3, which allows heart rate data collected by the earbuds to be synced through your iPhone to GymKit-enabled equipment, although I haven’t tried this because I don’t belong to a gym.
• watchOS 27 requires an Apple Watch Series 9 or later, Ultra 2 or later, or SE 3, paired with an iPhone 11 or later or iPhone SE 2 or later running iOS 27. That’s the requirement for the OS itself, but Siri AI also requires an Apple Intelligence–capable iPhone. The update drops support for Series 6–8, the original Ultra, and SE 2, too, although Apple’s Cait Dooley told TechRadar in June that those older models can remain paired with an iPhone and will continue to receive security updates.

Coming Soon to an Apple Watch Near You

I wouldn’t normally touch on unreleased features in an OS release, but so many things were announced during last week’s Surprise and Shine event that I wanted to give readers a quick recap of what’s still to come in watchOS 27, even though I haven’t tried any of these features yet.

When the new Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 arrive on doorsteps and in Apple Stores on Friday, their owners will be able to enjoy the following additional features:

• Apple’s New Health Sensing System: Both new Watches have redesigned optical and electrical heart sensors, which will allow them to take heart rate measurements every five seconds and HRV readings as often as every five minutes, which is up to a 24-fold increase in HRV measurement frequency compared with previous Watches. Apple says the new sensors will provide more accurate and meaningful measurements.
• Heart Rate and Vitals: On the Series 12 and Ultra 4 Watches, the additional heart rate measurements also enable an HRV section with recovery and overall HRV readings. Vitals also gains access to recovery HRV in its overnight measurements and adds a daytime view.
• Readiness: Readiness is a new app that uses your sleep, vitals, and recent activities to compute a score from 0–10, which the app translates into Recover, Pace Yourself, Ready, or Go For It recommendations.
• Sound Recognition: The new Watches can analyze sounds like a baby crying, alarms, sirens, and doorbells even if your iPhone isn’t nearby. When a sound is recognized, users will be alerted on their Apple Watch.
• Automatic Music Recognition with Shazam: With Music Detection enabled on the new Watches, Shazam will identify background music when you open the Smart Stack, without requiring you to tap the widget.

In addition, later this year, Apple is adding two new features to the new Watches, which you can read about in greater depth in my preview story from last week:

• Live Rewind: Live Rewind, which plays a sound and animation to alert people that it’s been activated, transcribes the last 15 seconds of speech to help with hearing.
• Siri Recap: A summarization feature that will pull key points from conversations and will support only English at first.

Both features are set to debut as betas later this year and require a Series 12 or Ultra 4 Watch paired with a supported iPhone 16 or later, excluding the iPhone 16e, with Apple Intelligence and Siri AI enabled. Both features are opt-in, and Siri Recap can be enabled manually or scheduled by time and location. Unsaved recaps disappear after seven days. Apple says audio is protected by handling processing in a Secure Exclave, but the resulting text can still be saved and shared, and it’s possible for Siri summaries to miss or misunderstand details. Those are things I’ll be looking at carefully when I can try the features for myself.

Finally, later this year, Apple will debut a redesign of the Health app on the iPhone that also incorporates a Health Age feature, movement evaluations, and lab work purchases and scheduling in the U.S.

Shaking off the Cobwebs

It’s funny to write a watchOS review hot on the heels of finishing my macOS Golden Gate review. In some ways, the two couldn’t be more different. My Apple Watch Ultra 3’s screen is about two inches diagonally and is designed to be interacted with in small, fleeting doses. Meanwhile, I’m writing this on my Mac Studio, using a 32-inch OLED display and an OS that’s as hands-on as they get.

Yet at the same time, there’s a similar transition going on with Apple Watch hardware and its OS that reflects a similar thing I see in macOS. Apple silicon lit a fire under macOS, opening up new ways to use Apple’s computers. That’s only accelerated with AI.

watchOS is in a similar place. The Apple Watch is already one of the most popular smartwatches on the planet, giving Apple Intelligence a place on a lot of wrists. Apple is raising the minimum hardware requirements for watchOS while introducing another set of capabilities exclusive to its newest Watches. We’re witnessing a shift from small, incremental watchOS changes to a new category of features. Starting with Live Rewind and Siri Recap, those additions have the potential to define the device’s future.

Today, the watchOS features that are currently available are more modest, typical features. I love the expansion of the Smart Stack, the new Siri app is incredibly useful as an extension of the app on other platforms, and it’s great to have Workout Buddy along for my runs without my iPhone.

In any year, I’d be happy with those and the other updates to watchOS, but this year, they feel like the first course of what I expect will be a great year for watchOS. AI has shaken the cobwebs off of watchOS, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Every OS update has a story to tell. With macOS 27 Golden Gate, that story captures a moment when Apple is faced with multiple challenges, many of which are tied to the rise of large language models.

One of those challenges is obvious. Apple was caught off guard by chatbots, overpromised a response at WWDC in 2024, and has been playing catch-up ever since.

But this isn’t simply a story of missteps or wasted opportunities. There’s more to it than that.

Two years before ChatGPT took the world by storm and began its march to 1 billion monthly users, Apple released the first Apple silicon Macs. Whether intentional or a happy coincidence, Apple silicon’s unified memory architecture fits like a glove for running and fine-tuning LLMs.

macOS’ UNIX roots make it a great fit for AI development, too. From working with Python to coding with agents in Terminal, the Mac offers a familiar command-line environment for developers working with AI.

Apple’s strength in these areas represents a huge opportunity for it and the Mac in the AI era. However, it’s that very industry that’s also fueling the challenges Apple faces.

Developers in the AI industry and power users setting up OpenClaw servers may have juiced demand for MacBook Pros and Mac minis, but data centers have made it hard for Apple to meet the demand for Macs and hold prices steady. Wait times for some Macs stretched into weeks and months this summer, and prices have risen. Still, Apple has continued to barrel ahead with new models, most recently updating the Mac Studio and Mac mini.

The AI industry has also been a drain on Apple’s talent pool, attracting hundreds of employees from across the company. Those departures are the backdrop to Apple’s high-profile trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI, which involves former employees now working on AI-focused hardware. The result is a messy, turbulent era for Apple and the entire tech industry.

At the same time, macOS is completing its transition to Apple silicon by dropping support for Intel-based Macs in Golden Gate. It’s a big milestone, but one that pales in comparison to the just-completed CEO handoff from Tim Cook to John Ternus.

Against that unsettled backdrop, macOS 27 Golden Gate has a job to do. It needs to finish the transitions Apple has already begun by:

• cleaning up loose ends from the transition to Apple silicon,
• making good on Apple Intelligence promises of 2024, and
• tightening up the Liquid Glass design refresh that began with macOS Tahoe.

There are many other changes to system apps and other parts of macOS that I’ll explore in this review, too. But these three pillars invite us to evaluate how well Golden Gate builds on Apple silicon’s already solid foundation, delivers on Apple’s 2024 AI promises, and improves the everyday experience of using a Mac.

With that, let’s dig into the details.

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Design

Of the three transitions that shape macOS 27, the Liquid Glass design language is the most recent. Announced at WWDC in 2025, the change drew strong reactions from early users and beta testers. Despite continued criticism in some quarters and vows not to upgrade until Tahoe’s design was “fixed,” I like Liquid Glass, as do most people I’ve talked to about it in my day-to-day life.

However, liking Liquid Glass is not the same as feeling that Apple nailed it with Tahoe. It didn’t. Tahoe’s design felt incomplete. It was as though there had been an all-hands meeting of Apple’s software designers who were given a detailed briefing on how to implement Liquid Glass but then they never talked again. Some apps took an aggressive Liquid Glass approach similar to iOS 26, while other apps felt like they’d barely been touched. In fact, there were even inconsistencies between how Liquid Glass was applied to different view modes in Finder.

Golden Gate addresses those issues with a more cohesive, readable experience. It also gives users control over transparency, addressing one of the core criticisms of Liquid Glass.

Icons

One of the most subtle changes to Liquid Glass is the way it diffuses light. The best place to inspect the difference is by looking at the icons side by side. The edges are darker, and the highlights are brighter, adding a greater sense of depth, while avoiding the softness and blurriness of Tahoe icons. The result is that UI elements are sharper and more readable, which is an accessibility and usability win.

Liquid Glass’ light diffusion update isn’t limited to icons, but because it’s one of the best ways to visualize the change, I’ve collected a few examples that show the change off especially well.

I like the refinement to Apple’s system app icons. What once made my screen look unnaturally soft and mushy is now crisp.

Alongside these changes, many icons have received small tweaks, such as Finder’s rounder nose. There’s also one wholly new icon and several material redesigns.

What Golden Gate does not resolve is the so-called “Squircle Jail” controversy introduced by macOS 26. Starting with Tahoe, Apple mandated that all icon glyphs appear within the bounds of their background tile. Icons that violate the new restriction usually end up shrunken inside a generic “squircle jail” tile, which doesn’t look good.

During the macOS 27 beta period, Paul Kafasis and John Gruber called for Apple to eliminate its icon rule, while Tyler Hall demonstrated a workaround. Nevertheless, “squircle jail” endures.

I can see both sides of this debate. On the one hand, as Kafasis argues, the uniform shapes Apple has imposed make it harder for people with color vision deficiencies to distinguish one icon from another. Former Apple designer Roger Wong takes a different tack, arguing, based on older Mac icons, that gaps in irregularly shaped icons can cause users to miss their click targets. Both arguments go to icon functionality and both have their merits.

On balance, I’m fine with the direction Apple has taken its icons. They mirror the design of icons on the iPhone and iPad, and there’s value in consistency for users who don’t think as deeply about icons as some Apple nerds. We’ve been trained through habit to expect that a squircle is an app. I also think Wong’s argument takes on even greater significance if the rumors that Apple is working on a touchscreen Mac are true.

Finally, the proliferation of SF Symbols in app menus has been reversed, too. You’ll see fewer in system apps, and Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines have been revised to advise third-party developers to use the icons “sparingly and with purpose.” Also appearing in the menu bar is a new Ethernet icon that replaces the Wi-Fi icon when your Mac is wired to a network.

Transparency and Toolbars

Alright, enough about icons. It’s time to think about transparency. Apple’s designers have significantly improved the readability of Liquid Glass elements throughout the system and given users a tool to tweak transparency to suit their own tastes.

I don’t envy Apple’s designers who have to design a UI that works with any app whether it exists today or someday in the future. The first iteration of Liquid Glass worked well with some apps, but fell down in spots, such as when the background of an app was busy and unpredictable. Music with its colorful album art and Photos with its views of photos of literally anything someone might take a picture of are both great examples. As you scrolled through music or photos, both apps’ toolbars often seemed to disappear or become unreadable as colors passed beneath the toolbars. Text-heavy apps like Finder presented a similar problem, sometimes causing the text of scrolling lists of files and icons to compete with the toolbar’s content.

macOS Golden Gate solves this with toolbars that diffuse the content beneath them better at the OS’s default setting. That default is squarely at the midpoint of a slider found near the top of the Appearance section of System Settings. Move the slider’s indicator to the left and more of the background will bleed through toolbars, and move it to the right and the background frosts over to a nearly solid color. The setting is accompanied by a handy preview that shows the effect that each point along the spectrum has.

A great example of the change is Photos, which has regained a toolbar structure that separates buttons from the content scrolling behind them. It’s a welcome change to an app that struggled with a more transparent Liquid Glass approach.

Apple’s solution is a good one. It would have been simple enough to give users a slider and be done with the transparency controversy, but instead its designers took the time to improve the default, too. The new default strikes a good balance between transparency and opacity that I expect most users will never feel the need to change. In contrast, I’ve always liked Liquid Glass’ transparency, so I set it all the way to the left where things are most transparent and never looked back.

Interestingly, I did the same thing on the iPhone and eventually dialed the Liquid Glass back a little. It may be the smaller screen or the fact that I use my iPhone in the bright North Carolina sun so often, but on the Mac, full transparency looks less extreme to me.

Toolbars also benefit from a more unified treatment. With Golden Gate, a continuous bar appears beneath controls automatically when content scrolls under them.

Sidebars, Corner Radii, and Drop Shadows

macOS Tahoe turned sidebars into glass-like slabs that sat on top of a window. I liked the layered look, but many others didn’t. Plus, when one window was obscured by others, it was too hard to tell if what you saw poking out was two windows sitting on top of each other and slightly offset or a sidebar.

The fix is to extend sidebars to the top, bottom, and side to which they’re anchored. The sidebars retain their glassy look and icons have regained their color, but the layering effect is gone. I can’t help but feel like something was lost in the update, but from a practical standpoint, it’s a usability win.

Golden Gate also brings more consistent corner radii to system windows. I honestly never noticed the difference between window corners, but it bothered some users who will no longer be bothered, which is a plus.

Finally, there was something about Liquid Glass that could make it hard to distinguish one window from another. I experienced this with Tahoe myself, especially in Dark Mode. macOS Golden Gate has more pronounced drop shadows, which become the new normal very quickly, but do a better job of defining the separation between windows.

Wallpapers

As always, this year’s macOS update comes with a beautiful set of wallpapers including Golden Gate, a dynamic golden wallpaper with sweeping curves that vaguely resemble the number “27,” and Golden Gate Sunset, a shot of the Golden Gate Bridge with an animated screen saver that’s mesmerizing to watch.

This year, the Mac’s stylized wallpaper also appears on other Apple devices, bringing a shared look across platforms.

Other Tidbits

We’re living through a menu bar app explosion thanks to AI coding agents, making it harder than ever to manage your menu bar. That’s especially true on Mac laptops with a notch. It really doesn’t take much to fill up the available space and end up with icons hidden by the notch or the tail end of an app’s menus.

There are third-party apps like Ice that will manage your menu bar for you, but new macOS releases can break them. That’s why on my MacBook Pro, I’ve historically aggressively managed my menu bar instead. But even then, it can be hard to avoid hitting the notch.

With macOS Golden Gate, Apple has added an overflow control in the form of a double arrow that appears when the notch or menu system is covering menu bar items. Click it and the hidden menu bar items appear to the left of the notch temporarily, so you can interact with them. This is especially helpful if you use all of the available space up to the notch and a new app installs a menu bar item that you want to move where you can see it, but it’s been hidden.

I like what Apple has done with Liquid Glass in Golden Gate a lot. My main reservations last year were the inconsistent implementation and poor legibility in apps like Photos and Music. The result is more coherent and usable, though whether the update is enough to satisfy Liquid Glass’ harshest critics remains to be seen.

The shape of icons matters, but it isn’t the design change that affects my use of the Mac the most. Clearer toolbars, windows that are easier to distinguish, and consistent controls have had a much more substantial impact.

More importantly, though, I appreciate seeing macOS’ design evolve alongside its hardware and the new tasks they’re called on to do. The Mac isn’t a static hardware platform, and its OS shouldn’t be either. I’ll miss the flourish of icons that escape their bounds, but if it makes it easier for more people to move from the iPhone, which is a far larger platform, to the Mac, that’s great. Software is never finished. macOS Tahoe’s design pointed the Mac in the right direction, but was a big enough departure from the past that it had some rough edges. Golden Gate addresses my biggest complaints with Tahoe and has been a pleasure to use all summer.

Siri AI and Apple Intelligence

The Siri app may be the marquee update of Golden Gate, but Apple Intelligence touches nearly every surface of the OS this year. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if, as soon as next year, features that integrate some sort of AI are still categorized under the umbrella term “Apple Intelligence” but are no longer treated as the standalone category that they have been for the past few years.

I say that because what’s striking this year is that everything about Apple Intelligence feels better integrated into macOS. Siri is perhaps the best example of all. What was once a voice assistant remains a voice assistant, but it has its own app now, too. Plus, Siri can be invoked from Spotlight, the Services menu, or simply by highlighting text and querying it with the “Ask Siri” contextual popup. It’s the sort of tight integration that Apple is known for, and its absence made some past iterations of Apple Intelligence feel bolted on.

Before diving into the new Siri app, it’s worth keeping in mind that Siri AI is launching as a beta on Apple’s platforms and is only available in English. Apple has also restricted Siri AI’s use, prohibiting kids under 13 from using it, and it’s not available in the EU on the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, but is available on the Mac. The new AI features won’t be available in China initially either.

What’s less clear is what limits Apple will put on Siri AI usage. Apple is offering enhanced access for now, but says cloud-based features are subject to usage limits and expanded access will eventually be a paid feature. The practical impact of these limits is currently unclear. That’s an important thing to keep in mind because my evaluation of Siri AI is as it exists today. Whether it’s worth paying for more than whatever the base usage winds up being will have to be evaluated another day.

I’ll get to all of the Apple Intelligence features you need to know about here and elsewhere in this review, but the best place to start is with the new Siri app because it’s undeniably the epicenter not just of Apple Intelligence, but all of macOS Golden Gate.

The Siri App

What goes around comes around. Siri started life as a standalone app all the way back in 2010. With the release of macOS 27 and Apple’s other OS updates, Siri is once again a separate app, while also remaining deeply integrated in other parts of macOS.

However, the new Siri app isn’t users’ only alternative. Siri’s new smarts have been baked into Spotlight, the Services menu, and individual system apps. That makes Siri more accessible than ever, lowering the friction of getting answers considerably, which is a big improvement over past Siri implementations.

But having Siri answer questions and having it take actions on your behalf are very different things. So, while you can ask Siri just about anything from anywhere, the results you’ll get will depend considerably on the information or actions you’re seeking. Siri’s world knowledge and ability to take actions at your direction are a big leap from the past. If asking world knowledge questions is your primary use case, I expect you’ll like the Siri update. However, if you’re already deep into tools like ChatGPT Work, Codex, Claude Cowork, or Claude Code for automation or assisting you with typical office work, you’re going to hit friction points quickly. That’s why it’s worth exploring what Siri can and can’t do as you think about how it might fit into your everyday work.

There’s a lot of ground to cover with Siri, so let’s get started with the Siri app itself.

The App and How It Works

If you’ve used an app like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity before, you’ll know how to use the Siri app. In fact, it’s far simpler than those apps. The Siri app has a sidebar on the left that displays your past chat threads in reverse chronological order, syncing them among your devices via iCloud Sync. Threads can be displayed as a list or a grid, which shows off images and other rich media in a thread. You can also pin conversations, which then sit at the top of the list or grid regardless of how many other chats you begin, and delete past conversations individually or in batches by selecting multiple chats.

The main part of the Siri app’s window is where you chat with Siri AI, Apple’s updated assistant. From here you can type queries or speak them using Apple’s built-in dictation feature. You can also add files and images to a conversation, start a new conversation or search past conversations. There’s really not anything more to it than that. In fact, the Siri app doesn’t even have its own in-app settings. You’ll find those in System Settings, instead.

System Settings brings together settings for Siri the voice assistant and app. For the app, you’ll find options to:

• open the app to a recent or new conversation,
• keep conversations for 30 days, a year, or forever, and
• show in-app conversation previews of 1–5 lines.

As for Siri’s answers, they’re generated by a combination of on-device and Private Cloud Compute models. The on-device model runs locally on your Mac and Private Cloud Compute (PCC) runs in the cloud. As Apple has explained, only the data necessary to satisfy a request is sent to Private Cloud Compute, where it is inaccessible to Apple:

PCC deletes the user’s data after fulfilling the request, and no user data is retained in any form after the response is returned.

Whether any particular answer is generated by an on-device model or PCC is not highlighted by Apple. That said, I’ve been happy with the speed of the Siri app’s responses. I’ve also tested PCC and tried the Foundation Models framework in a couple of apps I worked on over the summer and have been impressed with PCC’s speed in that context, too.

World Knowledge

Most of the people I know primarily use chatbots the way they used to use Google. They look up facts about the world around them from the hours that the local diner is open to the actor in a movie they’re watching on TV. It says a lot about what’s become of Google Search that a chatbot that sometimes gets facts wrong is preferable to searching the web, but that’s where we are in 2026, and I can’t really blame anyone who just wants an answer without a lot of ads and other nonsense.

If that’s how you’ve used chatbots like the free version of ChatGPT, I expect you’ll like the Siri app. It’s not perfect, but it’s good, and in my experience, Siri’s gotten better over the course of the summer.

In my macOS 27 beta preview story, I likened Siri to Google’s AI Overviews. Since then, Siri has improved, although the differences between services often come down to presentation and personal preference as much as the results themselves.

For instance, while I still find its suggestions for a vacation to Chicago a little uninspired, the results from Google AI Overviews and the free version of ChatGPT are about the same. The results of each service overlapped in places, and each set of results differed in certain ways, but all offered typical tourist destinations. Adding more detail about the kinds of things you’d want to do on a trip helped.

Your experience with Siri will depend a lot on what you want out of it too. I asked Siri for movies starring The Rock and got a list of four notable films and four additional bullet points expanding on the list. ChatGPT’s free service and Google AI Overviews both resulted in much longer lists of movies, but Google’s results were messy and OpenAI showed me an ad suggesting I book a hotel in Chicago based on my previous query. So, on balance, the Siri experience was the best of the three.

Historically, AI models have struggled to answer questions about events occurring after their training cutoff. Web search is used to help models answer questions beyond their training cutoff. Apple says Siri supplements its world knowledge with the web, too, but in my experience, the results aren’t as good as those from other chatbots. For example, Siri sometimes missed recent articles that Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT found.

One nice touch of the Siri app is that some results include rich content. For example, sports scores show the teams’ logos, and clicking a result expands it to reveal additional statistics. The presentation of scores and other information like biographies of musicians and images of landmarks seems pulled straight from rich results introduced in Spotlight with macOS Ventura in 2022. However, unlike those results, which were ephemeral, disappearing when Spotlight was dismissed, these results become part of your conversation history in the Siri app, where they can be retrieved later with search. This goes to show the benefits of a dedicated Siri app instead of just relying on a voice assistant.

Take Action!

There’s more to Siri than just world knowledge, though. One of the headline features Apple promised at WWDC in 2024 was the ability of Siri to take actions for you based on personal context and draw on personal context to provide answers tailored to you.

Siri’s ability to perform actions on documents and other data in an app relies on App Intents, the framework that supports features across Apple’s OSes, from Shortcuts to interactive widgets. In its simplest terms, App Intents lets developers describe their apps’ content and actions, which are like the nouns and verbs of a sentence. The nouns are things like a PDF document, photo, text message, or event, while the verbs are actions like send, edit, or open. Siri interprets a natural language request and connects it to the relevant content and available actions.

That makes it sound simple, but it’s not. There’s a lot that can go wrong from request to action, and for a lot of the summer it did. Siri often failed, and few actions were available besides ones for built-in system apps, but that’s changed.

In the closing weeks of the summer beta season, Siri’s ability to take actions consistently and in apps other than system apps has really come together. That’s not to say it’s perfect or that every app I’d like to see adopt App Intents has, but I’m far more optimistic about Siri taking actions in apps than I was in June.

For example, I have a trip coming up at the end of the month. I asked Siri to remind me what day I’m leaving. It found the email confirming my flight and gave me the date and relevant flight information. Then I asked Siri if I had any plans while I was away and it found a different email confirming that I’m attending OpenAI’s DevDay. Finally, I asked it how long it would take to drive from where I’ll be staying to the DevDay event, and once again, Siri nailed it.

To bring the conversation with Siri together, I asked Siri to summarize the details in a note, assuming it would pick Apple Notes. I was pleasantly surprised to get a menu of options, including Apple Notes, Drafts, Parchment, Finalist, and Cheatsheet, none of which were open on my Mac. I picked Drafts and Siri created a note. The only disappointment was that I asked Siri to open the note and it said it couldn’t, even though it could and did when I asked a second time.

That last failure is instructive because Siri isn’t perfect. You’ll hit roadblocks, even when it comes to things that it has done for you before. How much of that is just the nature of LLMs and how much is attributable to Siri’s integration with apps is impossible to tell, but as with any chatbot, it’s important to recognize that Siri AI makes mistakes, too, so proceed with caution and verify what you’re told.

Another useful tool is Siri’s ability to pull information from whatever is onscreen. That can be an app like Safari that’s built into Golden Gate or a third-party app. In my testing, onscreen awareness works far better from Spotlight than it does from the standalone Siri app. For example, I’ve been able to gather information from multiple apps and summarize them in Apple Notes with no problem. However, when I tried the same thing with the Siri app, it was often confused by floating panels from apps like Dropover.

Your experience with asking Siri to perform actions in apps will vary depending on the apps you use. Siri integrates well with Calendar, Notes, Reminders, Mail, Messages, Maps, and Photos, although not perfectly. Venture beyond those apps and the experience depends largely on how their developers expose content to Spotlight and actions to Siri through App Intents.

Other apps, both from Apple and third-party developers, generally don’t work or only work in limited ways. As I edit this review in Obsidian, Siri is unable to tell me what my most recently edited document is, for example. And, if I ask Siri for the last email I received in Spark, it cheats a little, looking the information up in Apple Mail instead. That’s a useful workaround, but it’s still a workaround. If my MacStories email address wasn’t set up in both places, Siri would have been stuck.

That points out an important caveat about Siri that Apple can’t resolve alone. The ability for it to take actions in apps is limited by the developers who implement it. If you use apps that aren’t supportedf for messaging, email, and calendaring, you’ll miss out on a big part of what Siri can do until they ship support for modern App Intents.

However, what is in Apple’s control and merits more attention is the breadth and depth of Siri AI support for its own apps. For instance, I just asked Siri to name the most recent file in my Downloads folder, and it picked one from three hours and 18 files and folders ago. In my testing, the Siri app couldn’t rename files, move them, or duplicate them, although Apple Intelligence can suggest names in Finder.

The same is true of Apple Music, which needs a lot of work. I asked how many songs I have in my Music library and was told “26.” I have thousands. I asked Siri to play Phoebe Bridgers’ latest album and instead of playing the album in Apple Music, an episode of Switched on Pop began playing, but the Podcasts app didn’t open and the Siri app didn’t show that it was playing something from Apple Podcasts. Once I realized I was listening to a podcast, I opened Apple Podcasts and saw that it was playing an episode about Phoebe Bridgers’ new album. Then I understood what was happening and could stop playback.

As I explained in my Golden Gate preview, this is frustrating because apps like Finder and Music include lots of useful metadata and work with a variety of automation tools. Some support seems to be available via existing Shortcuts actions, but not all of it, and unlike Shortcuts, the Siri app can’t use the command line or AppleScript as a way to extend what the app can do.

That said, I’m encouraged by what I’ve seen so far and optimistic about where App Intents is heading. Where Apple supports App Intents in Golden Gate, the experience has improved rapidly as the beta season comes to a close. It’s not perfect, but it’s reliable enough to make it a good solution for many people. Just as encouraging is the growing adoption by third-party developers, especially the indie developers we cover regularly.

As some of my examples demonstrate, there’s still plenty of room for improvement and expansion for Siri, but what’s out today is worth trying. I think you’ll find that in many cases, Siri will help you work more quickly and efficiently, which I love.

Personal Context

The final pillar of Siri AI that I need to cover is personal context, which is Apple’s way of describing the information Siri can access about you when responding to your queries. As with actions, personal context has improved a lot over the summer. For example, just weeks ago, Siri couldn’t identify my immediate family or find the Illinois address I lived at for over 20 years, but now it can.

However, while it can provide me with a bio of myself and Federico, it often struggles to explain how we know each other. That’s not a problem for other chatbots. After asking Siri how I know Federico in multiple ways across multiple separate conversations, I suspect the problem stems from Siri’s reliance on Contacts to answer questions about people. Coax Siri to investigate more deeply, and you’ll get a more satisfying answer.

Personal context draws from sources like your email, text messages, calendar, photos, and notes. In my testing, personal context is best at finding information about me in supported apps. It’s not as strong at combining that information with the context of my request. That doesn’t make personal context any less useful as a search tool, but to me “personal context” connotes a deeper understanding of who you are and your circumstances.

Here’s what I mean. On Labor Day, I asked Siri to suggest a restaurant I’d like, specifically mentioning that it was Labor Day as a hint that some places would be closed. Siri came up with two spots I like because I had threads in Messages confirming past online orders. It then asked whether I would like to check their hours.

I’m probably expecting too much, but there’s a lot wrong with that response. First, multiple order confirmations in Messages may be a good indicator of places I like, but the scope of the search is too narrow. There are lots of restaurants nearby that I like from which I’ve never placed an online order. However, Siri doesn’t have access to my credit card charges, so it doesn’t know about those places, although it could probably be inferred from driving direction requests and the time I spend at certain places based on Maps data.

Another issue is that I specifically asked about eating out on Labor Day. Most places near me were closed for the holiday, which was the case for one of the two places Siri suggested. Given my specific mention of Labor Day, that should have been taken into account in the first instance. What I’m getting at is that the personal context I’d like Siri to have (and use securely and privately) is much broader and deeper than a search of Messages, Apple Mail, or other apps.

That said, personal context feels like magic when you ask it for a URL or address you know is somewhere in Messages, Mail, or Notes, but you don’t know where. It just finds those things without you having to remember where the data lives. That’s genuinely useful and a great addition to Siri. Still, it’s closer to search than what I consider the kind of context where it would feel like Siri “knows” you. Maybe that’s too creepy for a lot of people, but if done privately and securely, that’s where I hope Siri is heading because it would take Siri to an altogether different level.

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A month ago, I wouldn’t have recommended Siri. Today, I would. It’s good for finding personal information, answering everyday questions, and performing tasks in supported apps. Its limitations still appear somewhat unpredictably, but it has become useful enough to earn a place in my day.

System-Level Apple Intelligence Features

Siri’s New Expressive Voices and Improved Dictation

You can pick one of multiple expressive voices. For American English there are a total of seven voices, two of which are brand new. Other voices include Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African English, and both expressiveness and pace can be adjusted with a slider. The UI for this is in the Siri section of System Settings (which replaces Tahoe’s Apple Intelligence and Siri section) and is nearly identical to what you’ll find on the iPhone or iPad.

The new voices are excellent, and I appreciate the ability to dial in the pacing and expressiveness. I’ve found that with my iPhone, I prefer less expressiveness since I hear Siri far more via turn-by-turn directions while driving, but I’ve turned it up a little on my Mac. Likewise, I have increased the pacing a little on my Mac, but kept the default on my iPhone. Apple’s defaults are good, but it’s worth playing with the settings to see if a different configuration suits your tastes for different contexts like it did for me.

That said, I don’t use Siri’s voice features nearly as much with my Mac as I do my iPhone or Apple Watch. That’s because my older M1 Max Mac Studio doesn’t support the voices, and with the MacBook Pro I’ve been using, I’m more likely to be somewhere where I wouldn’t want to speak aloud to my laptop. Perhaps that will change when I update my desktop Mac, but for now, I’m content without the feature.

Apple has improved dictation accuracy, too. You won’t see any difference in System Settings or anywhere else. The changes are all under the hood. On supported Macs, dictation will work better automatically. I’ve tried this with my M1 Max Mac Studio, which doesn’t support the new dictation, and an M4 Max MacBook Pro, which does, and the difference is noticeable. Speaking quickly or quietly leads to frequent dictation errors on the M1 Max Mac Studio, but the M4 Max MacBook Pro reproduced my words exactly, making it a good choice for on-device dictation if you have a newer Mac.

Finder File Naming and Actions

One of the low-key best Siri features of Golden Gate is its ability to suggest file names. If you’ve ever downloaded a PDF of a bill from a website, you probably have a collection of incomprehensible file names filled with seemingly random strings of numbers and letters. With the macOS 27 update, simply highlight the file name and Siri will suggest a couple of names using the content of the file. The feature also works inside document saving dialogs and with folders.

My experience with this feature has been good, but not perfect. Siri generally picks meaningful short titles similar to what I’d come up with myself, but once in a while it has suggested a calendar event instead if my file has a date in its name, which my screenshots often do. That said, this is a terrific feature I know I’ll use a lot.

You can also complete a handful of actions on files from Finder, including sending them via Mail or Messages, using either the contextual Ask Siri popup or Services menu. This is effectively the same limitation I covered above in the Siri app section, which is disappointing if you spend a lot of time wrangling files.

Writing and Editing

Apple’s writing and editing tools have been improved in a variety of ways. Automatic proofreading works well, although I have less use for the drafting and rewriting features. As you type, blue underlining will appear beneath misspellings and grammatical errors, letting you make corrections one at a time.

On my M1 Max Mac Studio, it can take a few seconds for the blue underlining to appear, but in practice, that delay isn’t problematic. I don’t typically go back to make corrections until I’m at a break point in the writing process.

What I like most about the proofreading suggestions is that they’re automatic. The blue lines simply appear, allowing me to quickly identify problem areas and step through them one at a time.

Siri has become a drafter and editor with Golden Gate, too. You can ask it to write something from scratch, adjust its tone, or rewrite something you wrote. While I don’t use AI-generated rewrites in my published work, I do have models create checklists, how-tos, and document workflows for me regularly. Having tried Golden Gate’s new tools to ask about the tone of my writing and do stylistic rewrites, I can report that they work as advertised, but I personally don’t like them. I’ve not seen a rewrite that I think is better than my own writing. However, I have found editing something like how-to instructions for conciseness is helpful.

Curiously, if you use Siri to change the style of your writing, you’ll get the side-by-side comparison of the original and edited version that Pages offers for proofreading, even if you’re using TextEdit or Notes. Why that comparison shows up for editing and not proofreading in some apps is a curious choice, and something I hope is made consistent in a future update.

Siri’s writing capabilities go a little further in Mail and Messages, offering suggested replies in your own voice. I’ve used a lot of apps that offer something similar and have never been comfortable with using them. Apple’s suggestions are on par with other apps I’ve used, but I don’t see myself ever using them.

On balance, Apple’s Siri writing and editing tools have made great strides from their origins. They are better integrated with the OS and system apps, and the quality of the text and edits they produce is better, too. When the tools were first introduced, I wouldn’t have recommended them to anyone. While I wouldn’t substitute them for a careful human editing pass, they’re useful for catching spelling and grammatical errors before you send an email.

Visual Intelligence

Apple has also added a keyboard shortcut for Visual Intelligence. Typing ⌘-⇧-Space invokes Siri, highlighting whatever visible window is under your pointer along with the Ask Siri contextual popup and a suggested action or two. The feature can be used to summarize or copy the text in an app, identify items in a photo, translate something, explain a chart, and more.

The Visual Intelligence shortcut is a cool trick but not one that I’ve used much in practice. More often, I grab a URL, screenshot, text, and other data, dump them into Codex and let it do its thing. The Siri app accepts text, images, and files, but it couldn’t retrieve contents webpages I gave it. So if you want to compare two iPhone models, for example, you’re either going to have to rely on Siri’s world knowledge (which is stronger on iPhones than on particular models of running shoes), extract the website content another way, or rely on something like Visual Intelligence.

Apple Intelligence for Automation

Apple has also brought its on-device and PCC models to the command line via the new fm tool, along with a Python library for accessing its on-device model. That makes it easy to incorporate the models into scripts run from Terminal.

These additions are great to see. There are a lot of automation use cases for Apple’s models, especially when you can process private data entirely on your Mac, so I’m glad Apple has made it easy to build them into your own workflows.

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Apple Intelligence has made great strides this year on the Mac. The difficulty with assessing its capabilities lies in the fact that everyone uses these tools a little differently and any one person’s use case may not work as well as another’s. But having spent the summer with Siri and Apple’s other Intelligence features, I feel like they finally have some momentum. The AI models are capable enough to support the OS features, and they fit more naturally into the fabric of the OS and its apps.

There’s no denying that Siri is light years ahead of where it was just a year ago. It really is a useful tool that you should try. I think you’ll find that there are myriad little interactions throughout your day that it makes better. That’s quite an achievement by itself, but that’s not the only stick by which Siri should be measured.

Apple doesn’t need to match every capability of ChatGPT Work or Claude Cowork any more than Notes needs to match Notion. There’s room for products with different ambitions and audiences. But for everyday questions and tasks, Siri still competes directly with those companies’ free chatbots, and its reliability needs to measure up.

That’s why I hope Apple continues improving Siri AI as quickly as it did over the summer beta season. The AI world doesn’t wait for point releases, and Apple can’t afford to either. My hope is that PCC continues to improve through server-side updates and that on-device models are updated frequently, too.

Apple has built a much more stable foundation for its AI features with macOS 27 and its other OSes. That’s an important first step because it will set the stage for years to come. I’m a fan of Apple’s privacy and security approach and the way it has integrated Apple Intelligence more deeply into its OSes. With Golden Gate, Apple has turned a new page on Apple Intelligence, transitioning from a story of missed opportunities to one about everyday utility. What counts now is whether Apple builds on its progress quickly enough for Apple Intelligence to be relevant.

Performance Improvements

Golden Gate’s performance gains were a big part of Apple’s pitch at WWDC this year. A “Snow Leopard” release had been rumored leading up to Apple’s developer conference, which turned out to be correct. When Federico and I sat down with Apple representatives for a briefing on the improvements along with other press people, it was Apple who mentioned Snow Leopard first. I was surprised, but when I got my hands on Golden Gate for the first time, I immediately understood why Apple leaned into the Snow Leopard vibes. The release really is faster.

This is going to be the shortest section of this review. Not because Golden Gate’s performance improvements aren’t important, but because my assessment is based on everyday use rather than benchmarks. Over the summer, I’ve noticed improvements across both my M1 Max Mac Studio and the M4 Max MacBook Pro Apple loaned me for testing.

Faster speeds have a tendency to start feeling like the new normal very quickly. You get used to them, and before long, it’s hard to tell whether you simply imagined the increases in the first place.

That’s not been entirely true with macOS 27. In fact, AirDrop still feels like magic compared to prior versions. I AirDrop screenshots to my Mac almost daily, and a multi-image send was often painfully slow, taking me out of the flow of putting my screenshots together for a story. Now, it’s so fast that it may as well be instantaneous in most instances, whether I’m sending images from my iPhone, iPad, or another Mac, all of which were on the betas this summer.

Another area that is much faster is browsing networked storage. I’ve hung SSDs and hard drives off of an Ethernet-connected Mac mini in another part of my house. Regardless of the speed of the drive, listing the contents of a large folder across the network can be slow. That’s not been the case with Golden Gate. Accessing the files on my Mac mini server over Ethernet has been smooth and fast all summer long.

Apps launch faster under Golden Gate, too. Not every app launches instantly, especially those built on web technologies, but with native apps, the difference is real and noticeable.

Other noticeable improvements include Spotlight indexing. After installing new betas throughout the summer, I often saw Spotlight indexing the next time I opened it, but it always finished quickly. Just as important, searching that index is much faster, too, with results displaying as quickly as I can type. That was not the case at all with some point releases of Tahoe where Spotlight got so badly bogged down that I went back to third-party launchers for a while.

In addition to speedier searches, Apple rebuilt the search foundation used by Spotlight, Photos, and Mail to ensure it’s more up to date and complete. Mail also adds a new ranking system that surfaces relevant emails in “Top Results,” while Spotlight offers more relevant search suggestions.

The same sort of search speed is found in Messages and Mail. Federico is handling the other new features of those apps in his iOS and iPadOS 27 review, but their search capabilities are worth reiterating here. There’s more to good search than speed, but it goes a long way, and with Golden Gate, I’ve had no trouble finding past messages and emails when searching in Messages and Apple Mail. Both apps have been quick and reliable, although I’m currently using Spark Mail more often than Apple Mail.

Scrolling and animations have felt smoother, too, although I notice the difference less now than when I first installed Golden Gate.

And that leads me to something that I think is important about these performance improvements to macOS 27. We’re living through dramatic price increases in memory and storage fueled by the AI data center boom. That makes improvements that help us get more out of the Macs we already own especially valuable. If an update makes an older Mac feel faster, it makes keeping it another year more appealing. With Golden Gate, Apple has breathed new life into your Mac, making it work more smoothly whether it’s a first-generation Apple silicon machine or a brand-new model. The company’s timing couldn’t be better, and it should be commended for helping users squeeze more out of every Mac it sells.

I also have a bit of advice for everyone who updates to Golden Gate. Bask in the glory of faster app launches, AirDrop transfers, and all the rest. As pronounced as the initial speedups felt when I first installed macOS Golden Gate, most became the new normal very fast, so appreciate them while you can.

Apps

Many of this year’s app updates span Apple’s platforms, so Federico and I have divided the coverage between our reviews. His iOS and iPadOS 27 review covers:

• Calendar
• Camera
• Clock
• Files
• Find My
• Journal
• Mail
• Messages
• Music
• Notes
• Phone
• Photos
• Reminders
• Safari
• Shortcuts

For my part, I’m covering:

• iPhone Mirroring
• Sidecar
• Preview
• Image Playground
• Weather
• Maps
• Podcasts
• Home
• the Mac-only features of Notes and Freeform
• FaceTime

Before getting into the apps, two features announced at WWDC won’t be available at launch: automatic upgrades for weak or compromised passwords and suggested actions in Messages conversations.

iPhone Mirroring

I’m a big fan of iPhone Mirroring. Until Nintendo released a web app, I used iPhone Mirroring almost weekly to listen to Nintendo Music on my Mac. But it’s become more than that. With iPhone notifications turned on so they appear on my Mac, it’s become an old habit to click on a notification, which opens iPhone Mirroring directly to the app that sent the message. I give it a quick check and then move on.

With macOS 27, iPhone Mirroring now supports adaptive layouts. That means you can resize the iPhone Mirroring window to many more sizes than were possible before. The connection to the iPhone Duo announced just last week is difficult to miss. Also, resizing apps like Weather and Reminders gives developers something of a preview of how Apple’s apps adapt to the iPhone Duo’s wider screen.

That said, it’s not a one-to-one comparison. Resizing a mirrored app doesn’t reproduce the Duo’s interface. At the Surprise and Shine Event, Apple also showed controls positioned along the sides of the Duo’s screen for easier thumb access.

Still, seeing widescreen versions of Apple’s iPhone apps over the summer was a fun exercise in imagining what apps on a folding iPhone would look like. Now, with the hardware revealed, it’s merely a more convenient way to experience your iPhone apps on a Mac. And why not? You have a big screen at your disposal, and adaptive layouts let iPhone apps that support them make better use of that display. I plan to use iPhone Mirroring even more as a result.

You can also play DRM-protected video via iPhone Mirroring. It’s not likely to work with every video service, but it’s a step in the right direction. Pretty nifty.

Sidecar

If ever there were an app that screamed “we’re working on a touchscreen Mac!” it’s Sidecar. Sidecar has been a great way to use an iPad as a second screen for your Mac for years now, but it hasn’t seen updates very often since its Catalina introduction.

This year is different because Sidecar now supports touch, letting you interact with your Mac’s interface with your fingers. And you know what? It’s not hard to do. The Mac has smaller UI targets than an iPhone or iPad, but those targets have been getting bigger and the UI more spread out for years. It started with Big Sur, as I noted in my review:

Whitespace is used by Big Sur to make information more glanceable, and windows feel more expansive too.

Tahoe had multiple examples of the trend, too, including taller buttons. macOS 26 also made buttons easier to identify without hovering, which also benefits touch, as I pointed out in that review:

Button groupings are always visible in Tahoe, whereas they only appear on hover in Sequoia.

Sidecar also gives users a chance to discover which Mac interactions work well with touch. And while I wouldn’t use touch for everything in Sidecar, scrolling and poking at buttons and menus is a lot easier than has been imagined in the past. I love that I can scroll a webpage with one finger, tap a Finder sidebar item, and choose toolbar commands without using my trackpad or mouse. So whether Sidecar portends touchscreen Macs or merely makes it easier to interact via a device that was designed for touch from the get-go, I’m here for it.

Preview

I didn’t go into WWDC with “Preview becomes a 3D editing tool” on my bingo card, but here we are. On the surface, it may seem curious, but Preview’s never been about just PDFs. It’s always been capable of editing a wide variety of images. Viewing 3D content isn’t new either, but this year macOS Golden Gate adds 3D editing.

The app allows users to manipulate objects, edit properties and lighting, explore scene hierarchies, and convert or compress assets. Rendering options include Apple’s own RealityKit, Storm, and a new raytracer, all with support for OpenPBR, a standard for describing how materials look and respond to light.

I’m so used to using Preview to do simple things like resize or crop an image or delete a page from a PDF that I was blown away by the depth of what Preview can do with 3D assets. This isn’t the sort of functionality that I expect to have a use for anytime soon, but I’m glad it’s there. It’s part of macOS and gives tinkerers a way to experiment with 3D assets without first learning a dedicated editing app. Making 3D tools more accessible could also encourage more people to experiment with assets for Apple Vision Pro. That’s pretty cool.

Image Playground

I’m not a fan of generative image tools for a host of reasons, and even if I were, Apple’s haven’t been very good to date. Image Playground is substantially better than before, but even its new photorealistic images still look off to me. Generated images of people in my life have an uncanny valley feeling. I can tell who the image is meant to depict, but it’s only a rough approximation of them.

macOS 27’s update is about more than people, though. Image generation now runs on Private Cloud Compute, and the app offers more control over the results. You can preserve the parts of an image you like while replacing individual elements or choosing a different aspect ratio, for example.

In the name of science, I took Image Playground’s new generation and editing tools for a spin. While I’m still not a fan of the images it makes, they are undeniably more realistic. I’ve also been able to remove objects and change their colors reliably, which makes natural language editing more useful than before. I don’t see myself using Image Playground, but it’s there if you want it.

Also, Apple is using SynthID, which was developed by Google DeepMind, to watermark images created with Image Playground, so they can be identified as AI-generated.

Weather

Weather has been redesigned for Golden Gate with a more orderly presentation. In Tahoe, the app featured an hourly forecast that stretched across the entire window (unless there was precipitation) just beneath the current conditions. Much of the more detailed weather data was confined to square tiles. Together it all formed an even rectangle, but the large number of square tiles made the design look a little messy, which also made it harder to scan quickly.

With macOS 27, the details below the current conditions are broken into two columns. The left column features a series of square and rectangular tiles, while the right column is bigger, allowing for more expansive layouts for hourly and daily forecasts and radar, which need the additional space. The bottom of both columns is anchored by a single row of square tiles. The underlying weather data hasn’t noticeably changed, but the new layout makes it easier to scan.

Two other changes are worth noting. There is now a segmented control near the top of the window to switch between current conditions, forecast precipitation, and wind. When each is selected, the hourly and daily forecasts change, as does the radar map. It’s an excellent addition that works equally well on every platform. Apple has also added a new Highlights section to Weather that appears at the top of the app’s weather data and summarizes notable upcoming weather events. Highlights is currently available only in U.S. English.

Maps

Maps’ two marquee features are enhanced Flyover mode and Local Lists. With Flyover, certain cities, including Boston, New York, London, and Chicago, include more detailed 3D renderings of their skylines. Turn on 3D mode and zoom in, and you’ll see what I mean. Apple has enhanced the 3D models for these cities with the help of AI to compose more detailed and realistic cityscapes.

Available in the U.S., Local Lists are a little like Guides, except instead of being hand-curated, they’re generated based on spots that are trending with Apple Maps users, like the list of Manhattan landmarks in my screenshot. The lists update periodically, too.

Other App Changes

Podcasts: Apple Podcasts on the Mac is catching up with the video features available on iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS. You can switch between watching and listening to a podcast on your Mac when a show supports HLS video streaming. Mac users can view the same video using Picture in Picture and can download it for offline viewing, which is great when traveling, too. Also, every Apple platform gains the ability to search from a podcast’s See All Episodes view, making finding back catalog episodes of a show easier.

Home: Home adds tools for finding and understanding HomeKit Secure Video recordings to all compatible Apple platforms, including the Mac. The new features require an iCloud+ plan with at least 2TB of storage, a compatible home hub such as an Apple TV 4K or second-generation HomePod, and an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone, with Apple Intelligence enabled in Home.

Apple uses on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute to describe recorded footage and collect recordings of the same event from multiple cameras. You can also search for clips by the video’s description.

The vast majority of my clips are simply described as “Someone is seen,” which isn’t very helpful as a description or for searching later. Admittedly, those recordings are an unexciting collection of trips in and out of our garage and taking out the trash. However, when it comes to security cameras, mundane footage is exactly what I hope to capture. The question is whether Home can provide useful detail when something out of the ordinary happens, which my testing hasn’t yet answered.

Notes and Freeform

Federico covered Notes in his iOS and iPadOS 27 review, but there’s one small addition to Notes on the Mac worth highlighting: drawing with your finger on a Magic Trackpad or using a mouse. Just select the drawing tool and start scribbling by clicking and dragging on the trackpad or holding down the mouse button and dragging. Drawing with your finger isn’t easy, but Notes does a nice job of smoothing out your squiggles, and I can see this coming in handy as a way to quickly create a diagram or sign your name and paste it into a PDF. The same drawing feature has been brought to Freeform, too.

It’s worth noting that this feature works with touch and the mouse only. You can’t draw on the Magic Trackpad using an Apple Pencil or third-party iPad stylus like the Logitech Crayon.

FaceTime

This year, Apple is expanding Communication Safety to help protect children from images and videos depicting gore and violence. The protection extends to FaceTime on the Mac and iPhone. Apple also says users will enjoy improved FaceTime call quality on poor connections, although I haven’t been able to verify whether those improvements extend to the Mac. Mac users can also select Mandarin Chinese (Taiwan) for Live Captions.

Everything Else

There are a bunch of other little updates sprinkled throughout macOS 27 Golden Gate.

Accessibility

As I wrote in May, Apple is expanding accessibility in macOS 27, including several features powered by Apple Intelligence. Among the features I covered then are:

• VoiceOver image descriptions that allow Image Explorer to describe photos, scanned documents, and onscreen images in greater detail than ever.
• Accessibility Reader, which better handles complex documents, including multi-column layouts with images and tables, and enables summaries and translation.
• Generated video subtitles for everything from video taken with your iPhone to streaming services.
• Better pairing reliability for MFi hearing aids with handoff between devices and a better macOS setup experience.
• Support for the Sony Access controller.

External Displays

For those who use multiple displays and non-Apple displays, there’s good news in Golden Gate. macOS now restores window positions and Spaces and remembers which screen they belong to better than before. This is especially handy when connecting and disconnecting a laptop. I’m a one-display-at-a-time kind of guy, so I haven’t used this feature a lot, but in my limited testing it worked as described.

macOS now supports more resolutions and refresh rates than before. I can now run my 32-inch ASUS display at 4K and 120Hz. HDR can be turned on for photos, video, and Golden Gate’s UI, too.

Everyday Conveniences

There’s a new keyboard shortcut (⌘⇧F) to access Recents in Open and Save dialogs. In addition, Move and Resize controls now work with Open and Save dialogs that are independent windows.

Also, pull to refresh has been added to Safari, Mail, News, and Calendar and is triggered with a downward swipe on your trackpad. It’s another interaction that would feel right at home on a touchscreen Mac.

User Control

The Dock gets a change in macOS 27, too. If you quit an app and it is still running a background process, the indicator beneath its Dock icon turns to light gray. You can stop that activity by right-clicking on the app’s icon and picking “Stop Running in Background.” If you repeatedly stop an app’s background activity, Golden Gate will offer to prevent it from running in the background in the future.

I’m a little torn over this feature. On the one hand, I appreciate knowing which apps may still be using resources after I quit them and like the control this offers. Yet keeping those apps’ icons in the Dock adds clutter, and I don’t think most people will understand what the light gray indicator means. I know I didn’t at first, and I expect that some users might think something nefarious is happening in the background, which isn’t necessarily the case.

macOS 27 adds extensive new Screen Time controls for parents, including Time Allowances for app categories and Schedules for app access during certain times of the day. Ask to Browse lets kids ask permission to visit websites, and there are expanded protections against gore and violence, alongside existing nudity protections. If you have young children, these features are worth a closer look. My kids are all grown, so I haven’t had real-world experience with these controls myself. It’s also worth noting that the new Screen Time features require all devices in your Family Sharing group to be on Apple’s latest series of OSes.

Moving On

macOS 27 Golden Gate can’t run on Intel-based Macs. However, Intel apps can still run through Rosetta. With Golden Gate, you can visit System Settings → General → About → Intel-based Apps → Details to view the list of your Intel-based apps. I had a few old Intel-based apps that I have since removed from my Mac. Apple has also retired AirPort Utility. If you already have it installed, the app won’t disappear, but it’s no longer bundled with clean installs of macOS. Finally, if you want to get ready for next year, encrypted HFS+ volumes will no longer be supported starting with macOS 28.

One Story Ends and Another Begins

When I wrote my macOS 26 Tahoe review last year, I felt like I’d just left the beach for the summer with a book that was promising but that I hadn’t had time to finish. Tahoe added a bunch of great productivity features, but Apple Intelligence was barely out of the gate, and Liquid Glass felt unfinished.

Fast forward one summer, and the vibe is different. This summer, macOS 27 Golden Gate gave Apple the chance to tie up loose ends, delivering a satisfying conclusion to the book I’d started the year before by refining Liquid Glass, improving OS performance, and making Apple Intelligence feel more at home on the Mac. But Golden Gate also feels like the beginning of another story, arriving alongside a change in Apple’s leadership.

John Ternus is often described as a hardware guy, and that tracks with his career at Apple. But during the Surprise and Shine event, what stood out to me was his emphasis on what hardware enables. Introducing iPhone Duo, he explained that Apple started with the experience it wanted to deliver and worked toward the hardware that could make it possible. That’s an encouraging perspective for someone overseeing the future of the Mac.

Apple’s leadership transition comes at a chaotic moment in tech that will shape how people use the Mac. Golden Gate’s priorities are clear. The update makes existing hardware more useful, gives users more control over background activity, and integrates AI in a way that honors the company’s privacy philosophy.

What encourages me is that Apple has begun translating its approach to AI into useful everyday features. Keeping control of my data matters, but so does having useful tools. Golden Gate brings both closer together.

Make no mistake, Apple has a long way to go. It’s not clear at all that this story will have a happy ending for Apple or any other tech company. Apple’s emphasis on privacy and security should be celebrated, but it doesn’t resolve the broader questions AI raises about society, the environment, and our culture.

Siri still needs to be more reliable, and I’d like the Siri app to do more, but I’m rooting for Apple on this one. As much as I get out of tools like Codex and Claude Code for building automations and apps and ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork for running MacStories with Federico, there’s still a lot of data I’d prefer to process on my Mac or through Private Cloud Compute.

As an opening chapter, Golden Gate is a good one. I’m hooked. I want to see what comes next. There are hints of good things to come, from a more capable Siri to touchscreen Macs and other gadgets. It’s going to be messy and chaotic, and I’m eager to see what comes of it.

2027 is going to be a page-turner.

Credits

No project the size and scope of my macOS reviews are created alone. Thanks to:

• My wife Jennifer and my kids, who put up with my end-of-summer crunch every year.
• Federico whose boundless curiosity, contagious enthusiasm for everything “new,” and willingness to question everything and change his mind are rare gifts.
• Silvia for the many things she does for MacStories, not the least of which is the cover of this year’s eBooks.
• Myke Hurley
• Stephen Hackett
• The engineers and designers at Apple who made Golden Gate possible.
• Every Club MacStories member for joining us on our chaotic journey through the tech world.
• And, of course, everyone who reads MacStories and listens to our podcasts. It’s a pleasure to write and record for you every day and share what gets us up in the morning with you.

Today we published not one, but three reviews covering four OSes:

• Federico’s iOS and iPadOS 27 review, which is packed with special interactive touches
• John’s macOS 27 and watchOS 27 reviews

The reviews cover design, new app features and more, which kicks off a big week here at MacStories that includes extra special perks for Club MacStories members. Here’s what we have planned.

For Club MacStories members, we’ve got some exciting perks to help you get more out of the reviews:

• An eBook edition of Federico’s iOS and iPadOS 27: The MacStories Review that you can download and read on your favorite device or app
• 20 additional ready-made shortcuts for iOS 27
• An eBook edition of John’s macOS 27 Golden Gate review
• An eBook edition of John’s watchOS 27 review.

If you’re not already a member, you can join Club MacStories for $5/month or $50/year using the buttons below:

And Club MacStories Plus and Premier members get even more. In addition to the Club perks listed above, Club Plus and Premier members will receive the following:

• Both will get an in-depth Making of the iOS 27 review with a detailed look at Federico’s Notion setup, his MLX local AI workflow, and more.
• Both will also get the custom web app that Federico built, integrating his review research system with Notion.
• Premier members and AppStories+ subscribers will get a special behind-the-scenes look at the role agents played in this year’s review process.

To unlock all of these additional perks, use the buttons below to join Club MacStories Plus:

or Club Premier:

These extras are our way of saying thank you to our Club MacStories members who support us throughout the year. It’s our goal to give members the best experience and most value we can, and we look forward to offering these perks alongside each fall’s reviews.

If you haven’t joined Club MacStories, now’s a great time to give it a try because it comes with a bunch of fun bonuses alongside all the regular benefits. Read on to learn more about the Club and this year’s special extras.

Club MacStories Perks

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All Club members will receive eBook editions of iOS and iPadOS 27: The MacStories Review, macOS Golden Gate: The MacStories Review, and watchOS 27: The MacStories Review that are fully interactive and complete with all the images and videos. This eBooks are DRM-free and yours to read any way you like, on your preferred eReader or eBook app. While the web version is a great way to read the review, we know a lot of Club members value the flexibility of reading it as an eBook, where you can jot down notes, highlight passages, and take a closer look at images.

Club members can access the eBook versions of our reviews via their personal Downloads page.

Club MacStories Plus and Premier members will also get the custom web app that Federico built, integrating his review research system with Notion. And Premier members and AppStories+ subscribers can listen to a special behind-the-scenes look at the role agents played in this year’s review process during the AppStories+ post-show segment.

You can join Club MacStories for $5/month or $50/year using the buttons below:

Club MacStories includes year-round perks too. In addition to the special review season perks, Club MacStories features:

• MacStories Weekly, a weekly newsletter with our favorite iOS and Mac apps, tips and in-depth automation tutorials, exclusive stories, interviews, and more.
• The Monthly Log, a monthly newsletter with behind-the-scenes stories from the MacStories team delivered at the end of each month.
• An ad-free, high-bitrate audio version of MacStories Unwind, the podcast that Federico and John record weekly. MacStories Unwind is a fun exploration of the differences between American and Italian culture and features recommendations for media we enjoy, including books, movies, TV shows, music, and videogames.

Club MacStories Plus and Premier Perks

We’ve got even more benefits in store for Club Plus and Premier members.

Federico is also working hard on a “Making of” story that explains how he used LLMs running locally via MLX combined with Notion to create this year’s iOS and iPadOS 27 review. It was a significant change to the research process that accelerated his writing significantly and can be adapted to other research and writing workflows.

If you enjoy the review and want to learn more about how it came together, this is the way to do it. It’s a peek behind the curtain of MacStories’ biggest project of the year.

Club Plus and Premier members will be able to access the eBook versions of all of this year’s reviews via their personal Downloads page later this week.

Join Club MacStories Plus:

Join Club Premier:

As a Club Plus or Premier member, you’ll also receive access to our vibrant Discord community, bonus columns from Federico and John, an advanced version of the Club website that includes advanced search and filtering controls, custom RSS feeds of Club articles, and more. And, for just $2/month or $20/year more, Premier members get AppStories+ too, the extended, ad-free, high-bitrate audio version of our flagship podcast, which is released early most weeks.

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In case you can’t tell, we love this time of year here at MacStories. After spending the summer putting Apple’s latest OS updates to the test, it’s a thrill to get to share our findings with you and make these software releases a special event for the MacStories community. As much as we appreciate what the new features and enhancements have to offer, it’s conversing about them with you, our readers, that makes this season the joy that it is.

We hope you’re enjoying the week thus far, and we hope you’re looking forward to what’s in store as much as we are. Thank you for reading, and a special thanks to our Club MacStories members who help make all of this possible. Happy reading!

In the 11 years I’ve been writing annual iOS and iPadOS reviews every summer, I don’t think I’ve ever struggled to find an “angle” for my story as much as I did this year. The reason was twofold: I wasn’t particularly enamored with Siri AI and Apple’s belated chatbot efforts; and, as I realized during the summer, it can be challenging to write about an OS update that is largely focused on performance improvements and refinements.

“Everyone wants a so-called Snow Leopard year until it actually happens,” I thought to myself on several occasions over the past few months. Think about it: on paper, we all love a good ol’ basket of bug fixes that just make our phones better without changing much about the overall design and experience of iOS. It’s a commendable effort, and there’s no denying that iOS 27 is the snappiest (insert meme here), most stable version of iOS I’ve ever tested – and it has been since the first developer beta. In practice, though, it turns out that considering a major iOS update merely through the lens of improvements and fixes can be…a little boring.

So I’ve been sitting on this review for a while. I let it simmer. Then, a month ago, as I was sunbathing with my girlfriend Silvia down south in beautiful Vieste, Puglia, it hit me: iOS 27 is a geographically ambiguous update. Stay with me here. Depending on where you are in the world, this update can either be a little boring or pretty exciting.

If you’re a MacStories reader with access to Siri AI, you fall on the “pretty exciting” end of the spectrum. From my perspective as someone who’s been using frontier models and has embraced different agentic workflows over the past year, Siri AI can’t compete with the intelligence offered by models from the four American companies leading the AI race right now. As I wrote back in July, however, Siri AI has an advantage: its proprietary integration with iOS frameworks, personal context, and third-party apps.

As I’ll explore in the Siri AI chapter, the results can be hit or miss: inferior intelligence and lack of agentic features won’t impress power users who have grown accustomed to the likes of Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work. At the same time, what Siri AI can accomplish with Apple’s own apps and compatible third-party ones is an objectively nicer and more powerful iOS-native experience than anything else on the market right now. And: even if Siri AI’s chatbot capabilities don’t land at the frontier of AI benchmarks, it undeniably is a better Siri for Siri-type tasks than it’s ever been. I know: that’s not a high bar to clear, but the difference is quite dramatic if you go back to the old Siri.

In the three months that I’ve spent with iOS 27, I’ve come to appreciate the “little boring” side as much as the exciting one, which is not what I was expecting after WWDC. Even if we set aside the dozens of features introduced by Siri AI and Apple Intelligence, iOS 27 is the kind of update that fixes hundreds (not hyperbole) of paper cuts throughout the entire operating system.

You may not notice them at first: perhaps you’ll think that Notes always allowed you to insert a divider line, or that Music’s Now Playing screen always worked in landscape mode, or that you’ve been able to export a frame from a video in Photos for a while now. And that’s where iOS 27’s “boring” nature turns into its opposite: if you’re the kind of iPhone and iPad user who cares about this stuff, these smaller enhancements across Apple’s entire catalog of apps will probably mean more to you than a barebones Siri chatbot app. My goal with this review is to shine a spotlight on these smaller improvements that have had a meaningful impact on my everyday iPhone experience.

I may have struggled to fully understand iOS 27 for a while, and perhaps to an extent I still do, as we’ll see with Siri AI. But I know one thing now: iOS 27 is not a Snow Leopard release. It’s less flashy than last year’s Liquid Glass update, and it’s not as bombastic for iPad users as iPadOS 26 was. Instead, iOS 27 shows that Apple is still capable of delivering something new while caring about the old.

Let’s dive in.

View this on MacStories.

Design

If you’ve been following Apple for some time, you know that there’s almost a natural – some would say “institutional” – process to how the company’s design team takes bold leaps forward, then refines and iterates on them over time. It happened with Aqua. It happened – loudly, in the age of social media and the then-nascent YouTuber space – with iOS 7. This year, it’s happening with Liquid Glass. As John Gruber once quipped: this is how Apple rolls.

It’s no secret that I ended up enjoying Liquid Glass and what Apple set out to achieve with its focus on fluid, compact interfaces. That appreciation has only grown over the past year: I found myself gravitating toward third-party apps that embraced Liquid Glass instead of the ones that stubbornly refused to acknowledge its existence, which is usually a pretty good sign that something is clicking with me. As I wrote last year, however, Liquid Glass was not perfect: it carried intrinsic readability and accessibility shortcomings that would often make some UI elements hard to visually parse or small text illegible against clear backgrounds.

On balance, Apple stuck the landing with Liquid Glass in iOS 26. Anecdotally speaking, in conversations I’ve had with real-life friends (who are most definitely not MacStories readers) over the past year, I’d say that Liquid Glass was a success with people. The fact that a bunch of Android manufacturers have ended up copying Liquid Glass is a sign that, despite what some fringes of the old Apple commentariat would have you believe, the market has not rejected Liquid Glass. At the end of the day, the numbers speak for themselves.

One of the reasons I like covering Apple products is what I mentioned at the outset: success notwithstanding, the company does not stand still. As I suspected last year, Apple designers have not gone back to the drawing board and “scrapped” Liquid Glass (I remember reading some folks suggest that); Liquid Glass is still here, as is the focus on minimizing UI chrome and emphasizing the content space. The company has, however, done something unusual with iOS 27: it has doubled down on both ends of the Liquid Glass spectrum by embracing, once again, customization.

Instead of attempting to find a “balanced” take on Liquid Glass that would please everybody, Apple now allows users who really love Liquid Glass to make it even clearer and “glass-ier” than before; at the same time, it’s letting folks who strongly dislike it make Liquid Glass more opaque and frostier than ever.

In addition to new personalization options, Apple has improved the underlying Liquid Glass rendering engine to diffuse content more effectively, reworked the specular highlights system to create a better “layered” effect than iOS 26, and more. Will this be enough to guarantee a smoother adoption by app developers who have resisted Liquid Glass? Are these changes a cop-out, or a reasonable move to make the iPhone more customizable for folks with different priorities and needs?

Let’s take a look.

Customizable Glass

The first major change for Liquid Glass in iOS 27 is a new ‘Appearance’ section of Settings that consolidates some options (which were previously available under ‘Display & Brightness’) and introduces new personalization settings for the Liquid Glass material.

In iOS 26, Liquid Glass could only be either ‘Clear’ or ‘Tinted’. In iOS 27, there is now a slider in Settings → Appearance → Liquid Glass that lets you choose any level between three default styles: More Clear, Default, and More Tinted. Unlike last year’s basic preview, the new screen in iOS 27 lets you preview what real UI elements would look like with different glass levels on top of photos of Apple Park’s ring building, the Rainbow, and a certain mythical creature.

At its clearest setting, Liquid Glass is as clear as it’s ever been. If you’re a Liquid Glass sicko like me and did not mind the ultra-glassy look of iOS 26 beta 1 last year, dragging the slider all the way to the left in iOS 27 is what you want to do. As long as you can live with severe legibility issues in apps that scroll content under tab bars or floating toolbars, you’re going to have the time of your life with a hyper-polished glass material that fluidly morphs and animates on screen even better than last year thanks to iOS 27’s (many) performance and rendering improvements. I’ll be blunt: this is the setting I use, and I love it. YOLO.

On a more serious note, it is interesting to observe where the defaults have landed for Apple’s design team in the past year. On average, the new ‘Default’ option in iOS 27 is more tinted than the ‘Clear’ setting of iOS 26. This suggests to me that Apple collected feedback and understood that more people would benefit from having a slightly more tinted Liquid Glass appearance by default than the other way around. At the same time, Apple is introducing personalization as a way to appease those who loved Liquid Glass as well as those who couldn’t stand it.

I encourage everyone upgrading to iOS 27 today to play around with the new Liquid Glass appearance settings and see which one you prefer – and, remember, you can set the slider at any point between the three default styles offered by Apple. Below, I am including some comparison shots that demonstrate different Liquid Glass levels in Apple’s own apps as well as Waluigi’s Glass Lab, a demo app I created with Codex for this review to show off new Apple APIs and Liquid Glass UI elements. (No, I am not accepting testers for Waluigi’s Glass Lab, I’m sorry.)

After three months with iOS 27, my takeaway is that there’s more to this year’s Liquid Glass than different transparency levels alone. What I find more impressive, in fact, is the work that has gone into improving the underlying rendering engine and how it diffuses content and layers UI elements in the first place. It is maybe a little cliché to say, but this is what Liquid Glass should have been all along. Thanks to a combination of more effective diffusion and refraction, darkened edges, and brighter specular highlights, the updated Liquid Glass is more legible and does a better job of creating multiple “layers” of glass that stand out against content.

Take the Music app’s ‘Get Up!’ playlist and its warm orange background, for example, and its pink-accented tab bar. The selected ‘Home’ tab in iOS 27 is drastically more readable than last year’s – and I am using the clearest version of Liquid Glass.

The context menu? The darker edge around it makes it feel more layered than before – almost as if it’s “floating” on screen. This has also allowed Apple designers to use a glassy material for it, which is stunning compared to last year’s dark context menu:

As you use iOS 27, you’ll notice this better separation of layers and improved diffusion everywhere, so I’ll spare you the dozens of examples here. You get the gist.

All this begs the question: is customization a way to fix Liquid Glass’ underlying problems by sweeping them under the rug of “fine, you fix it for yourself”? Yes and no.

To an extent, a slider lets Apple have their cake and eat it too: Liquid Glass die-hards are happy, the material is a bit more tinted by default, and those who absolutely despise it can adjust the slider all the way to the right. But I’m not a pessimistic tech commentator, and I’ve followed this company long enough to reiterate that I believe the static, “bestowed upon users with no tweaking allowed” era of software design is over, and has been for a while. I don’t know if making Liquid Glass more customizable had always been in the cards; what I do know is that Apple has been embracing deeper user customization for several years now. A more customizable Liquid Glass is consistent with the work Apple has been doing in opinionated, yet flexible UI design for the last six versions of iOS.

If you ask me, it would have been a mistake for Apple not to make Liquid Glass more customizable this year. In fact, I’d go one step further and wish I could customize Liquid Glass per app, just like I can tweak text sizes for individual apps across the system. I’d love to make Music clear and Safari a bit more tinted, for example.

The new Liquid Glass looks great, and there continues to be nothing else that matches its aesthetic, performance, and shape-shifting nature across the entire tech landscape.

Extra Large Widgets on iPhone

It is quite funny that one of my favorite “small” additions to iOS 27 for iPhone users is called “extra large” widgets. As the name implies, this new size class lets you add widgets that take up an entire Home Screen page, allowing apps to use an expansive canvas for custom content and interactions that would otherwise have felt cramped on smaller widgets.

In Apple’s apps, you can now find extra large Home Screen widgets for:

• Calendar
• Home
• Mail
• Music
• Notes
• Photos
• Reminders
• Shortcuts
• Stocks
• Weather

I know what you’re thinking: these widgets were designed for the inner display of the iPhone Duo, and you wouldn’t be wrong. As early marketing materials and hands-on impressions have shown, it should be very nice to keep a stack of XL widgets on one side of the inner Home Screen and regular icons on the other.

In my testing with the iPhone 17 Pro this summer, I’ve enjoyed this new widget family as a way to preview content that apps usually present as long lists. When I have a busy day with many events and tasks, it’s great to flick through the Calendar and Reminders widgets and get a complete overview of what’s coming up without opening those apps.

The new extra large widgets are also great as Home Screen-native control dashboards. Since the new size allows for multiple interaction areas in the widget panel, you can effectively have dozens of launchers or actions baked into the same widget. The Shortcuts XL widget, for instance, lets you run up to 16 shortcuts without launching the app; the Home widget lets you control up to 14 accessories or scenes from the Home Screen.

It’s no surprise, then, to see third-party developers jump at this opportunity to showcase even more content and actions from their apps on the Home Screen. The excellent dictionary app LookUp now comes with an extra large ‘Word of the Day’ widget that not only displays beautiful artwork for any given curated word but also embeds buttons to mark a definition as favorite, shuffle through words, and even listen to a word’s pronunciation from the Home Screen. The folks at Mercury Weather have shipped a stunning XL widget that’s not only tinted based on current weather conditions but also shows hourly and weekly forecasts in the same widget thanks to the increased content area. And, of course, apps like Launcher and Lock Launcher are taking advantage of the larger surface to embed even more app shortcuts on the Home Screen, effectively serving as quasi-replacements for the default Home Screen app launching experience.

Extra large widgets are yet another step toward letting users have complete “mini app” experiences directly from the Home Screen – a trend that started years ago with the introduction of Home Screen widgets in iOS 14. I’m a fan of this new size, and I look forward to testing it on the iPhone Duo.

Lock Screen Changes

There are two changes worth noting to the Lock Screen this year. The first one is the complete opposite of extra large widgets: a minimized clock option that puts the current time next to the date at the top of the Lock Screen, right underneath the Dynamic Island.

To enable this mode, you can customize the Lock Screen, tap the clock to enter the ‘Font & Color’ panel, then tap the new symbol in the top-right corner of the panel to toggle between large and small clocks:

While I appreciate the addition of this option for minimalistic Lock Screen setups, it defeats the purpose of an always-on display for me. From my perspective, the point of having a modern iPhone with an always-on Lock Screen is to glance at the display from a distance and tell the time quickly if I’m not wearing my Apple Watch; the minimized clock prevents me from doing that. But I also know that this design makes more sense on the iPhone Duo and its smaller screen.

The other change is that you can now swipe away the system’s Now Playing control on the Lock Screen when something is playing. In iOS 27, swiping on the control will reveal a ‘Clear’ button that lets you remove the Live Activity from the Lock Screen:

Notably, clearing away the Now Playing control also removes the activity from the Dynamic Island, but it does not interrupt or pause audio playback. It’s just a nice way to clear out the Lock Screen.

Icon Updates

One last favorite change of mine deserves a proper visual look instead of too many words about it: all the Liquid Glass Home Screen icons have been refreshed with a more detailed, sharper look.

According to Apple, the new app icons in iOS 27 have “more character, detail, and sharpness in light, dark, tinted, or all-clear looks,” and this has been made possible by the use of additional Liquid Glass layers in each icon as well as the aforementioned improvements to rendering and diffusion.

I’ll explain it another way: comparing the old iOS 26 icons against the new ones in iOS 27 feels like putting prescription glasses on and seeing everything clearly for the first time. There is an underlying blurriness and softness to iOS 26’s original icons that I didn’t notice until I actually started comparing them side by side with iOS 27.

I love this change, and to properly show off the differences in this review, I decided to try something different. Below, you’ll find a gallery of all system icons from iOS 26 and iOS 27, which you can compare across the four system tints: light, dark, clear light, and clear dark.

I’ll let Apple’s work speak for itself here. If you’re like me, after seeing the new icons, you’ll probably wonder how we lived with iOS 26’s blurry Home Screen mess for a year. Good riddance.

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Siri AI

It’s been challenging for me to think and write about Siri AI this summer, and I’ve already explained why: as a person whose workflow now revolves around agentic tools, I was not impressed by Siri AI at first.

I don’t think I was the only “power user” on Apple platforms who’s had this thought since getting their hands on the first beta of iOS 27 in June. If you’re reading this, chances are you’re pretty well versed in what models by OpenAI, Anthropic, or others now offer in terms of assistant features, web-based app integrations, memory, long-running tasks, and more. The product surface of Siri AI – the tentpole feature of iOS 27 that Apple is finally shipping after a two-year delay – has very little in common with those other agents or assistants, whatever you want to call them. Technically, yes – they are all based on a large language model under the hood. From a benchmark perspective, Apple’s new Foundation models are vastly behind the latest state of the AI frontier currently occupied by four American labs.

But as a product for people, Siri AI has a threefold advantage that no other company can match:

1. It’s built right into your phone or computer
2. It has a built-in knowledge graph about you in the form of personal context
3. It can act upon, and retrieve data from, the native apps you use every day, from Apple to third-party ones

And these advantages sum up why I struggled to understand Siri AI at first. Is Siri AI only passable because it has an unfair advantage due to proprietary integrations that other AI models can’t use? Can it stand on its own as a good implementation of AI for most people? Does it fundamentally reinvent how we use our devices, or is it just a lot of hype for a slightly better Siri?

Unpacking the answers to these questions will be my goal with this chapter. But I’m going to do something unusual and share my takeaways up front, since they frame how I’ve been using and thinking about Siri AI.

I find Siri AI’s underlying models to be subpar compared to the competition: for anything beyond a simple knowledge query, I can’t see Siri AI replacing ChatGPT and its superior reasoning modes combined with web search. For simpler queries – the kind that a Google AI overview could also capably answer – the balance of speed and terse formatting is optimal in Siri AI. If I’m watching a movie and want to know how old an actor is, or if I want to know the meaning of a word, Siri AI is perfect for it and I no longer need to reach for ChatGPT or my personal agent in Open Minis. As we’ll see later, I find the Siri app to be extremely barebones and representative of the state of the art for chatbot design…two years ago.

The lack of an “agent mode” for Siri AI stings, and it’s why I can’t replace my beloved Codex or Hermes Agent setups with it.

However, Siri AI eventually clicked for me for the opposite reason: it can do things in and with apps that no other third-party agent can. Yes, they are simpler actions, and, no, results aren’t always perfect; but if you love the Apple app ecosystem and prefer using excellent native apps to cross-platform web ones, Siri AI is a breath of fresh air in the AI landscape right now.

See, Siri AI is complicated, polarizing, and almost impossible to agree upon.

Welcome to AI, Apple.

Foundation Models and Siri AI’s Architecture

Before I cover what the new Siri actually looks like and how it is split across a system-wide assistant and a brand new app, let’s talk about what it is and what powers it under the hood.

The new Siri is powered by a system orchestrator that coordinates user requests across different modalities (text, voice, and images) and five new Apple Foundation models, which are:

• AFM 3 Core
• AFM 3 Core Advanced
• ADM 3 Cloud
• AFM 3 Cloud
• AFM 3 Cloud Pro

The first two are on-device models, with Core Advanced being exclusive to more recent devices with higher RAM. ADM Cloud is an image diffusion model that runs in the cloud, and which I will not cover in this review since I have no interest in generative images. AFM Cloud and Cloud Pro are cloud models running on Private Cloud Compute, with some differences: while Cloud is optimized for latency and efficiency (both for users, since it’s faster, and for Apple, since it costs less to serve), Cloud Pro is capable of deeper reasoning and agentic tool use, and it does not currently run on Apple-made servers. Instead, Apple teamed up with Google and NVIDIA to host Cloud Pro on NVIDIA GPUs running on Google Cloud, while maintaining the same privacy and security guarantees as “regular” PCC. (Only Apple can deploy software to these nodes, and only Apple can sign that software. More details here.)

All of these models were, according to Apple, trained with proprietary data and reinforcement learning, then “refined” with data from frontier Gemini models. Essentially, the new AFM family of models was refined with distilled Gemini outputs. I can’t stress this enough: although Siri AI and AFM may exhibit some behaviors reminiscent of Gemini (as I’ll explain later), Siri AI is not “powered by Gemini” and there is no Gemini to be found in Apple’s operating systems. No Gemini model or agentic harness is being used by Apple.

There are a couple more details worth exploring about the underlying nature of Siri AI. The first concerns what is, in my opinion, the most interesting model of the bunch – the new AFM 3 Core Advanced that runs on-device. For starters, Apple now has a larger local model that is multimodal: Core Advanced supports vision capabilities and powers the advanced dictation and expressive voices of the new Siri. Because of the increased footprint and technical requirements of this model, however, Apple had to restrict it to more modern devices:

• iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, iPad (M4) or later with at least 12 GB of RAM
• Mac (M3) or later with at least 12 GB of RAM
• Apple Vision Pro with M5 (I always forget this exists)

The architecture of the model itself is also interesting. As I previously explained, while AFM 3 Core is still a 3B model with a dense architecture, AFM 3 Core Advanced is a 20B model that can run on devices with 12 GB of RAM. That’s made possible by a technology that Apple invented for sparse architecture models in which the model is stored in flash memory, activated parameters are locked in per prompt, and only 1 to 4 billion parameters are activated concurrently depending on the user’s request. From Apple:

One area of deep innovation is our most powerful on-device model, AFM 3 Core Advanced. Traditional large language models—whether dense or sparsely activated—require all weights to reside in active memory (DRAM), creating a massive footprint that limits scalability on consumer hardware. To break this barrier, AFM 3 Core Advanced introduces a novel sparsely activated architecture built on Instruction-Following Pruning (IFP), a technique developed by Apple researchers.
Instead of forcing the entire model into DRAM, the full model is stored in flash memory (NAND). Because NAND-to-DRAM bandwidth is too slow to swap weights token by token, as standard MoE models require, AFM 3 Core Advanced makes routing decisions per prompt. A lightweight, dense block selects a fixed set of experts during initial processing, periodically reselecting them during generation. To minimize data movement, the model relies on a high percentage of always-active “shared experts” alongside input-dependent “routed experts” swapped into DRAM only when needed.

You don’t need to be an AI expert to understand that what Apple wants to achieve here seems remarkably complex and optimistic. Here we have a company that is two years late to its original promises for an AI-powered Siri, and which is saying it has built a system to orchestrate five models, across multiple modalities, with support for proprietary World Knowledge (since you can now ask Siri general questions about anything, too), and which is going to draw from your personal context on-device as well as integrate with all kinds of third-party apps. And while all of this is happening, the system should know how to split inference across local and cloud models, how to allocate reasoning effort levels, how to coordinate actions across apps, and how to do it all in less than 15 seconds with a nice, minimalistic UI.

When I started working on this review, I struggled to visualize and understand the new Siri AI architecture in my head, so I built something with Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra to help me, and I’m embedding it in this review because maybe it’ll help you too. For the following visualization, I started from Apple’s official Siri AI graphic that the company shared at WWDC, then I combined it with the Apple Intelligence Report that can be exported directly from the Settings app in iOS and iPadOS 27. The report contains all Siri AI requests that were issued by the user over the span of 7 or 30 days, and it includes details on the steps taken by Siri AI, what tools were loaded, how many tokens were in the system prompt, what third-party apps returned via App Intents, how much time each step took, and more.

The interactive visualization shows you some examples from my real requests – typos and everything – that were performed with Apple’s built-in apps as well as AskPlay and Emoji Countdown. As you can see, it’s a very intricate system that is executed remarkably fast by Siri AI and the system orchestrator.

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By and large, what Apple has built works, and as a user of Apple devices and the new Siri AI, you will never see any of its underlying complexity.

The new Siri AI is far from perfect and objectively behind the state of frontier AI models, but it’s also doing things that no other company is, and I firmly believe it is going to be good enough for millions of people.

If you’re coming from any other AI product from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or the rest of the industry, you must reset your expectations in more ways than one when it comes to Siri AI.

First, unless you’ve been on the beta and have already let your device go through its new indexing process, you’ll probably have to wait a few days until you a) get access to Siri AI and b) can use it to its full extent. In order to work properly, Siri AI needs to build an index of your context and apps, and this process isn’t quick. You can speed up the indexing by keeping your phone on Wi-Fi and connected to a charger, but it’s not immediate. You can monitor its progress via a system message displayed in the Settings app; in my experience, while the initial indexing takes a while, subsequent updates to the index are much faster, if not downright immediate in some cases (such as downloading a new app and asking Siri AI questions about it).

Second, you should let go of a bunch of UI conventions you’ve probably grown accustomed to when using ChatGPT or Claude over the past two years. There are no model pickers, reasoning selectors, skills, @mentions of plugins, context windows, memories, “fast modes”, or usage resets in Siri AI. This new product embodies the quintessential “it just works” Apple mantra – sometimes to a fault. The new Siri looks and works like a more conversational Siri that also comes with a dedicated Siri chatbot app. There is nothing you can configure or tweak about it besides, well, using your devices with different apps.

There is a fascinating dichotomy occurring between the underlying complexity of Siri AI and the utter simplicity presented to users. Most frontier AI models and products wear their complexity on their sleeves, with different levers to pull and settings to tweak if you want to get the most out of them. Apple isn’t giving users this kind of customization (or responsibility?) yet, and I think it’s the correct choice to ease over two billion people into the uncomfortable world of AI.

The New Siri

Let’s talk about the actual product.

The new Siri presents itself across five different surfaces:

• Voice
• Text
• Siri app
• Camera
• Contextual menus in apps

I’ll save the Siri app for later; I want to focus on the system-wide Siri experience for now.

At its most basic level, you’ll immediately recognize the new Siri by its design. The old glowing animation around the device’s bezels is gone, replaced by a floating dark orb made out of Liquid Glass that, on iPhone, smoothly descends from the Dynamic Island to listen to you. The orb pulses slightly to indicate it’s listening, and as you speak your requests to Siri, its multicolor waveform (the only place where Siri kept its former colors) reacts in real-time. The fluidity and responsiveness of the animations are top notch, which shouldn’t come as a surprise from the team that gave us the Dynamic Island, Liquid Glass’ morphing transitions, and the iPhone Duo’s flavor of iOS.

The new Siri animation is even more impressive on iPad, where the orb “comes out” of the device’s bezel like a drop of liquid that lands at the top of the screen and, since it’s made of glass, beautifully refracts whatever is underneath. Even better, this fluid transition can be triggered from anywhere in the iPad status bar:

As you talk to the new Siri, you’ll see the orb dynamically shrink into a “thinking” activity with a loading indicator, then expand again into a dark, translucent overlay that, unlike other chatbots, presents results visually with a combination of text, images, and custom UIs belonging to the apps whose data is being fetched thanks to Apple’s App Intents framework. Ask for your tasks, and you’ll see a Reminders snippet; ask for where you went today, and you’ll get a grid of photos; if you want to quickly save an idea, ask Siri to make a note, and you’ll be presented with an inline Notes card at the end. You get the idea.

At any point during a conversation with the new Siri, you can switch to text input by swiping down on the Siri response and start typing. This is part of a larger story in iOS 27: system-wide access to Siri and the unification of Siri and Spotlight. The assistant and the system’s search feature have been merged into the same UI element – a floating search field that can be activated from anywhere by swiping down on the Dynamic Island. Doing this will reveal the new call-to-action for this box: Search or Ask.

Just as with the previous Spotlight, you’ll see some suggestions for apps you can launch or other activities; the difference is that now the system can determine whether you’re searching for something or formulating a request for Siri. If the latter mode is detected, Spotlight search results will be collapsed, and ‘Ask Siri’ will appear next to your query, indicating that you can hit Return to ask Siri AI a question instead of searching with Spotlight.

It takes a while to get used to the idea that you can now search and ask questions from anywhere on your iPhone without using your voice, and it’s awesome. iPhone users never had the ability to invoke Spotlight from outside the Home Screen when using apps; in the three months I’ve spent using iOS 27, I can’t tell you how accustomed I’ve become to jumping between apps or searching inside them without leaving the app I’m in.

When using the new Siri and alternating between search and ask modes, you’ll never be able to tell which local model is being used or if Siri is going off to the cloud and picking one of the two models running there. You can infer what’s going on (if a request is taking a bit longer, the underlying Siri orchestrator probably decided to use extended reasoning in the cloud), and there are ways to inspect your Siri AI reports later, but – by design – all complexity is abstracted from the experience when Siri AI is visible to the user.

What you will notice, however, is the new Siri voice.

The New Siri Voice

The new expressive voices for Siri AI are powered by Apple’s larger on-device model and, as such, are exclusive to more recent devices. They are a substantial jump in terms of voice quality and expressivity compared to the older Siri voice in iOS 26: tone and cadence feel more natural, enunciation sounds less robotic than before, and, most of all, the voices can be customized.

Once you have the new Siri AI, head over to Settings → Siri → Voice, and you’ll be presented with a gorgeous new voice preview and personalization screen that lets you pick from a selection of unlabeled voice types across six English accents (American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish, South African). You can tap the colored dots to preview each voice, and Siri will speak a longer demo sentence than iOS 26. Amusingly, a part of the sentence is about the fact that otters hold hands so they don’t drift apart. I did not need to know this, and I can’t stop thinking about this fact now.

Anyway, only American and British voices support personalization in the form of pace and expressivity sliders. Pace is easy to understand: drag it all the way to the right to make it go fast. For my taste, I have set the pace to the fourth notch of the slider. Expressivity is a little trickier to understand: it sets the voice’s underlying tone and how the assistant switches intonation between different phrases. Personally, I’ve set mine all the way to the right.

There is no denying that the new Siri voices are vastly superior to what Siri sounded like before. Here, let’s do a comparison between Siri in iOS 26 and Siri in iOS 27:

The new voices are impressive for something that is being generated on-device, and I think most iPhone users upgrading to Siri AI now will notice the difference and think that Siri sounds better than ever. It’s remarkable that all of this is being generated locally across multiple accents.

In the context of the broader AI industry and voice experiences, however, the new Siri voice still trails the frontier. As far as voice itself is concerned, ElevenLabs’ v3 model sounds more natural than Siri AI and was introduced over a year ago in June 2025. I would argue that even Kokoro, an open-weight text-to-speech model with 82 million parameters that supports more voices and the ability to create custom ones, sounds nicer than Siri. (You can listen to this very paragraph generated with Kokoro.) And then there’s GPT-Live, the frontier bidirectional voice model by OpenAI that powers ChatGPT Voice, introduced earlier this year. GPT-Live is, by all measures, the current state of the art for natural assistant/person conversations since it supports interruptions, real-time tone and cadence adjustments (you can ask ChatGPT to slow down or whisper), and long-running back-and-forth conversations that Siri AI is simply not designed for.

This is an important point: if you think that Siri AI will allow you to ramble to a digital assistant for 10 minutes and have a “conversation” with it like you can with ChatGPT Voice, you’re going to be disappointed. Siri AI is not capable of that kind of voice interaction yet. Siri AI’s voice experience is still based on the classic “ask question/wait/listen to answer” pattern from the older Siri. It’s slightly more conversational, and it sounds better than ever, but it can’t hold a prolonged conversation: you can’t go for a walk and start talking to Siri AI to brainstorm with it like many folks do with ChatGPT Voice.

To give you even more context, here’s a comparison between Siri AI and ChatGPT Voice, recorded using the GPT-Live-1 model for paid users:

Comparisons between Siri and other AI-based voice experiences are a good indicator of where things stand right now. Apple is still behind the top American labs when it comes to sheer model quality, and can’t yet enable experiences we’ve seen in other chatbots. Over a billion people can chat for free with GPT-5.5 Instant and GPT-Live-1-mini in ChatGPT, and both models are superior to Apple’s roster of five Foundation models – not to mention that they are available worldwide and are multilingual by default. Siri AI is only launching in English, despite the two-year delay. The comparison to the rest of the industry isn’t even fair.

At the same time, not everyone is interested in or trusts the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic for their digital assistant needs. In fact, I’m willing to bet that there are hundreds of millions of people who just wanted a better Siri because, frankly, the old one was an awful product that Apple should have been embarrassed by.

The new Siri is a much smarter, more capable, and nicer Siri than before. On a scale from “awful” to “state-of-the-art AI frontier”, Siri AI sits comfortably in the middle. It is a solid product that finally gives Apple users a good digital assistant that works well enough for most requests. At the same time, it is a product that will not “wow” AI power users and proves that Apple still has a lot of work to do if they want to compete in this space, especially if their newfound rival (and defendant) enters the hardware market in the near future.

And since multiple things can be true at the same time (and people can hold multiple opinions – what a concept), it is also undeniable that Siri AI delivers a “good” experience across the more challenging spectrum of an entire operating system, which neither OpenAI nor Anthropic can currently match.

But how is it better?

Siri as a General Assistant

Put simply: Siri is smarter overall for most things and has pretty good and up-to-date world knowledge baked in. When I ask something like “what tasks do I have today”, the new Siri gives me both my reminders and calendar events, which the old Siri couldn’t. Last week, I asked about what Liam and Noel Gallagher had been up to recently, and after a few seconds, Siri rightly pointed out they’d just attended the Venice Film Festival and that rumors of a 2027 Oasis tour were circulating. When I ask Siri to send my most recent photo to Silvia, the assistant prompts me to pick a recent photo, then prepares an iMessage preview, and confirms with me that I want to send it. As we’ll see in a later section, working with Siri AI and apps can be a remarkably efficient experience, and – once again – it’s leagues above what the old, dumb Siri used to be.

As a result of all this, I find myself defaulting to Siri AI for most “quick questions” about on-device things or web searches that I would have completed with Google AI overviews before. Since Apple’s world knowledge graph is good and up-to-date enough, whenever I have a question that doesn’t need a deep research report, I use neither ChatGPT nor Google anymore: I just ask Siri. If I want to go deeper on a topic, then, yes, I tend to switch back to another agent, but for any simple factual question, Siri AI is my default search engine now.

When writing this review, I frequently had to go back and test the old Siri in iOS 26 and, let me tell you: after using Siri AI in iOS 27, I was shocked to re-experience just how bad Siri was. The effect is quite dramatic: the new Siri is no longer plagued by those useless “I found these on the web” results like before, nor does it go off to ChatGPT to get some additional help. In most scenarios, the new Siri just answers and provides you with a good-quality response. If you have multiple Apple devices, I suggest leaving one on iOS/iPadOS 26 for a short while so you can have some fun comparing the two versions of Siri side by side, which will make you appreciate the new one even more.

Beyond system-wide access, new voices, and superior world knowledge compared to iOS 26, Apple’s big bet with Siri AI is going past what other self-contained agents and chatbots can do. When you’re using ChatGPT Work or Claude Cowork, or perhaps even more complex products such as Hermes Agent or OpenClaw, you are always recreating your profile, workspace, and preferences in a silo. This is why memory is such a sought-after currency in the AI market: by locking users into their ecosystem, different AI providers can make it less enticing to switch to a competitor. If you’re OpenAI and aiming to build an operating system, it makes a lot of sense to lay a foundation in the form of memories, computer history, and other personalization tools that make users feel like they can’t switch to anything else.

Despite the efforts of AI labs over the past year to go beyond chatbots and ship a semblance of a platform, the truth is that only Apple and Google actually have a platform where AI can be deeply embedded and serve as an app-agnostic assistant layer. In simpler terms:

Apple thinks you’re going to be using Siri AI because it works with any app on your phone, gathers context about you automatically from any app, and can also see what’s on your screen no matter the app you’re using.

These capabilities are what Apple refers to as on-screen awareness and personal context, and although I’ve experienced some issues with them, I’m also very excited about their potential: they’re the features that have made Siri AI stand out the most for me.

On-Screen Awareness and Personal Context

The idea of on-screen awareness is straightforward enough: Siri can now see what’s on screen and act on it. It may not sound like a big deal, but that would be a wrong assumption: the system Apple has built around on-screen awareness is a great example of how we can weave AI features throughout the interactions we have every day.

At a high level, whenever you’re looking at something on-screen and want to ask Siri a question about it, you can invoke the assistant and just ask. Being able to ask Siri questions about the current state of an app visible on screen isn’t new – in fact, it was introduced in iOS 9 with the ability to say “Remind me about this”. What’s different now is that we have the power of an LLM to process not just a deeplink to an app’s screen, but an entire set of annotated data points (provided that app developers support them) that give Siri plenty of information about what’s visible on the user’s device.

Under the hood, iOS 27 apps can embed invisible annotations about any content shown on screen, so that Siri AI gets direct metadata from each compatible app instead of merely taking a screenshot and performing OCR on it. For instance, if you’re looking at a page that mentions an event, you can say “add this to my calendar”, and Siri will know what you mean and create an event with the title and dates extracted from the visible page. But it goes deeper than that. Say that you’re looking at an album in the Music app, and you want to play a specific song but can’t tap the screen. Say “play the third one” and Siri will know that you mean the third one in the list and start playback immediately because it’s not screenshotting what’s on screen and then searching for the song: the song is an entity that’s been annotated with an identifier that tells Siri exactly what to play.

Once you understand the flexibility of this on-screen system in Apple’s own apps (and, hopefully, lots of third-party ones soon, too), you can start mixing and matching requests, which is where the fun begins. I was in the Music app, and I wanted to know more about a specific song of an album, so I asked: “Did the first one also come out as a single, not as part of this album?” Sure enough, Siri AI saw that I was looking at Oasis’ The Masterplan, that the first song was Acquiesce, and that it was, in fact, originally released as a B-side to the Some Might Say single.

Combining on-screen awareness with additional search queries or actions is one of my favorite aspects of Siri AI, and I think Apple’s engineers have done an outstanding job integrating this in their apps and creating APIs for developers to do the same. When looking at a text in the Messages app, you can say “love that last message” and Siri AI will add a heart Tapback to it; in Files, you can say stuff like “send the third document to John” and Siri will know from your context (more below) and on-screen awareness that you mean a specific person and the third item in a list.

How effective on-screen awareness turns out to be will depend on how well third-party developers support it. From what I have seen in Apple’s apps so far, though, I believe pervasive, reliable on-screen awareness has the potential to reshape how we think of Siri. It takes a while to accept that Siri can be this good and versatile: I still struggle sometimes to remember that, when looking at Reminders, I can say “mark the second one as done”, or that I can look at a calendar event and say “email the participants that I’ll be 10 minutes late”, and Siri will draft a message with Mail about it. I think others will go through a similar “reset phase” as they figure out that Siri is actually pretty great for this stuff now.

Personal context is the trickier Siri characteristic to explain, as well as the area where Siri AI has struggled the most for me over the past three months.

The theory is the following: by building an index of your apps and data, Siri AI is able to draw from your personal context and answer questions without you having to mention an app by name, specify a time period, or be too precise about your question. This is not meant to be proactive assistance (which Siri AI cannot do and is currently the holy grail for AI labs alongside recursive self-improvement); personal context is more like an automatic “enrichment” of answers that doesn’t require you to ask.

A popular example used by both Apple and Google is the flight one: ask about when you’re supposed to pick up a friend at the airport, and Siri will tell you that Myke’s flight lands at 3 PM because it has that context from iMessage. In my tests, I’ve seen personal context in action in a handful of ways. One time, I asked where my dogs went the day before, and Siri told me that Ginger was at the beach, which it knew because it had a Ginger album from Photos and indexed photos of her taken at the beach. My query was generic, but the answer was precise. Likewise, when I asked “Did John tell me things I have to do this week?”, Siri gave me a list of things John previously told me over email and iMessage.

You’re not supposed to know that personal context is working, and that can be both a blessing and a curse. When Siri AI does bring up a useful piece of information about you, unprompted, it feels amazing, and it perfectly encapsulates Apple’s competitive advantage in AI: unlike other companies’ assistants, Siri AI can know everything about you as long as you keep using Apple devices.

On the other hand, I’ve frequently run into scenarios where a question I knew had data to back it up in iMessage couldn’t be answered by Siri AI at all, or where the context about me was simply stale. This, I believe, is a byproduct of Apple’s on-device indexing approach: results don’t get indexed immediately, and the entire thing can feel like a mysterious black box.

As a result, my mind hasn’t been blown by personal context in Siri AI yet, but I remain hopeful that Apple is on the right track from a strategic perspective. I wonder if more capable hardware and future model updates will be able to help in this regard, letting the index be refreshed more frequently and proactively suggesting more details in new Siri chats.

The Siri App

The new Siri is no longer just a voice assistant on iOS and iPadOS: it’s also a full-blown app with an icon on your Home Screen. The app holds all of your conversations with Siri and allows you to keep expanding a conversation after your original request, meaning two things: Siri is now also a traditional chatbot, and your Siri sessions are no longer ephemeral since they can be reviewed and continued later.

The problem is that the Siri app is, quite frankly, a pretty bad app. It is extremely barebones compared to the rest of the AI industry and their chatbot offerings, lacking all kinds of integrations and features that people have gotten used to having in ChatGPT or Gemini. It feels like using GPT-4 in ChatGPT from a couple of years ago. Furthermore, it performs badly, with slow animations, visual previews that are frequently missing on screen, and other technical issues that do not meet Apple’s standards of excellent iOS apps (such as Notes, Safari, Reminders, or Journal).

Really, there isn’t much to say about the Siri app other than it’s nice to have a place where you can revisit and resume previous conversations. By default, the app opens with a “cascading” grid layout that looks great in screenshots but is the most uncomfortable layout I’ve ever used in practice if you want to find a specific chat. Thankfully, you can revert to a classic list mode by tapping a button in the top-right corner of the app.

You can then rename, pin, or delete conversations, and you can tweak three settings for the Siri app in Settings → Siri:

• You can choose to open the app to recent conversations or a new conversation
• You can keep conversations forever or have them automatically deleted after 30 days or 1 year (there is no custom option)
• You can set the preview text for the main view from ‘None’ to five lines of text

Inside conversations, you can long-press a response to share it as a PDF, copy it, or have Siri’s voice read it aloud (with a nice mini audio player inside the app); you can attach files and photos; and you can press a microphone button to alternate between text and voice input.

And…that’s basically it. Coming from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, or any of the Chinese LLMs such as Kimi and GLM, the Siri app feels like an overly simplistic product that was almost built out of spite, even though Apple had more than two years to put this together. You cannot organize chats in folders or tags. There is no support for reusable commands and instructions in the form of skills. Given Apple’s invisible approach to context, there is no support for any kind of personalization or user-reviewable memory whatsoever. Want to tweak Siri’s writing style? You can’t. Want to review what Siri knows about you? That’s not possible.

I may be used to working with frontier AI models more than the average user, but it’s hard to deny that this app feels very primitive by any modern standard. Even more annoyingly, Siri isn’t aware of itself at all: Siri AI cannot search and find its previous conversations with you, so while you can resume a conversation later, start a new one and ask “hey, did we ever talk about this topic?”, and Siri AI has no idea what you’re talking about.

This all goes back to a longstanding issue with Apple’s product philosophy: the “it just works” approach can be amazing when everything goes as expected, but it can be detrimental to the user experience when something breaks, or when the user wants to have slightly more control over a particular app. Historically, in my iOS and iPadOS reviews, I’ve pointed out many such examples, from last year’s barebones launch version of Local Capture (which was later improved), to the Home app’s automatic grouping in iOS 13 and the lack of app labels in multiwindowing for iPadOS 13.

I think the Siri app, and Siri AI in general, suffer from this very issue: in an era where users demand to be able to inspect and tweak what AI knows about them and how it operates for them, Siri AI and its app expose no such controls. I mean, it is literally a product where you can ask questions about apps on your device…and there is no picker to visually @mention those apps in a chat.

Some might say that I’m too hard on Apple, and that I should be happy that Siri finally has an app. Let me be clear: I’m very glad that Siri can now be accessed as a persistent application on your Home Screen that lets you keep the same chat going for multiple days. But even if we set aside the more cutting-edge aspects of competing AI services, the new Siri app launching with iOS 27 feels instantly outdated. I expected more after a two-year wait.

Visual Intelligence and the Siri Camera

When Visual Intelligence debuted with iOS 18.2, it did so with little fanfare as a hidden feature that required you to long-press the also semi-forgotten Camera Control button to trigger it. Over the past two years, I have never seen anyone in real life use Visual Intelligence, and I think that’s going to change with iOS 27 and Apple’s decision to rebrand it as just “Siri” and put it front and center in the Camera app.

You can still activate The Feature Formerly Known as Visual Intelligence by long-pressing the Camera Control button, but you don’t have to: just open the camera, then swipe from the default Photo mode to Siri (which has been prominently placed before Portrait mode), and you’ll be able to freeze-frame and start asking questions as before.

Despite the fresh coat of paint, the underlying mechanics of the feature are the same. You can freeze-frame on any subject, and Siri will give you an automatic response based on what you’re looking at. The Siri camera, as before, supports a variety of data detectors for text, units, and other symbols recognized on screen, and it allows you to either follow up by typing a question or check out related image results with extensions, with Google Images still being the default provider.

The most important difference from iOS 26 is that answers in the Siri camera will be provided by the new Siri AI, not ChatGPT. And that means that you can integrate this new Siri surface with everything else on your device. A few months ago, our building manager posted a notice with the dates for the mosquito spraying that happens every couple of weeks during the summer. Every year, we want to make sure we remember this is happening so we can close our windows beforehand. When I saw it, I opened the Siri camera, pressed the side button to invoke Siri inside the camera, and asked it to add those dates to our Family calendar. Siri froze the frame, found the dates, and created about a dozen events with the right time inside the calendar that I share with Silvia.

Earlier this summer, I spent a few days in Gaeta, and as we were walking to dinner one night, we spotted this huge vessel docked in front of the restaurant. Typically, I would have taken a picture, started a new ChatGPT thread, uploaded the image, and asked a question about it. This time, I simply held down the Camera Control button (which now defaults to Siri AI mode in the Camera app) and captured a photo. A few seconds later, Siri AI told me I was looking at the Palinuro, a three-masted barquentine that serves as a training vessel for the Italian Navy – which was spot-on. An interaction that would have taken 20-30 seconds with ChatGPT was reduced to a five-second affair with Siri AI. Better still, I was able to ask follow-up questions from Siri AI’s floating overlay as well as find the chat in the Siri app later, where I continued asking questions about the ship’s history and usual locations.

These are just two examples of the kind of integration that you can have between the Camera app and Siri, and it would be impossible for me to cover all of them. As you may have noticed with my recent coverage of AI products and features, my job is becoming more about explaining the foundation and harness of AI tools rather than what they can accomplish – because they can achieve almost anything. And so depending on what apps you use and what you need from Siri, perhaps you’ll use the Siri camera to translate a restaurant menu and send it over iMessage to a friend; maybe you’ll want to point the camera at a book and ask Siri to create a note about it in Apple Notes; perhaps you’ll point the camera at a monument in Florence and ask Siri to tell you more about its history. All of these use cases will work, and this AI feature – like everything else – will be what you make of it.

Write with Siri and Context Menus

There are two more Siri AI surfaces I want to cover. The first one is ‘Ask Siri’, a permanent fixture of every context menu in iOS and iPadOS 27 that lets you instantly pass whatever item you’ve selected – whether it’s a file, some text, a note, or a link – to Siri as input, so you can ask something about it. This isn’t a particularly special feature, but it highlights the kind of pervasive integration Siri AI now has at a system level.

The other integration is ‘Write with Siri’, a system-wide replacement for Writing Tools that eschews Writing Tools’ menu and options in favor of a more freeform interaction with Siri.

You can access Write with Siri via the Siri button above the keyboard on the left, or by selecting the Siri icon in the action menu when some text is selected. With an active text selection, default ‘Proofread’ and ‘Rewrite’ options will also appear in the QuickType bar.

No matter the activation method, there’s no longer a “static” UI for how you want text to be modified or generated: you can just ask Siri. That’s how LLMs work – you ask, they do – so why limit this feature to three writing styles or four formatting options, as it used to be in iOS 26, when you can just prompt the model to write or format text in any way you want?

Now, I’ve never been a huge Writing Tools fan, so I don’t have a strong opinion about the rebrand in iOS 27, but I think the new design works and makes sense given the stronger abilities of Siri AI. I like that you can compare before/after changes with inline, swipeable cards at the bottom of the screen, and I like that you can ask it to edit anything as long as you’re in a text field. I’m not going to use this much, but for quick typo checks or making an email sound more formal, I find the new feature more versatile and capable than before.

Using Siri AI

I’ll be honest: I’m not one of those people claiming they have completely stopped using ChatGPT or other agents in favor of Siri AI.

The new Siri is not an agentic product that is able to carry out long-running tasks to completion, and it would be downright absurd to compare Siri AI to the likes of ChatGPT Work, Claude Cowork, Grok Bot, Hermes Agent, Open Minis, or OpenClaw. I would love for Siri AI to become that kind of experience, and Apple seems to think it now has a foundation in place to enable agentic behavior at some point. But as things stand now, given my reliance on Notion, Slack, and Superhuman for work, and given the simpler, less intelligent nature of Siri AI, I can’t imagine using Apple’s assistant for productivity purposes. In the making of this review, I never used Siri AI once; research work, editing, asset management and video production, database organization, and coding tasks all took place in either Codex with GPT-6 Astra, Claude with Fable 5.1, and Open Minis on iOS.

Instead, I’ve come to appreciate Siri AI for what it is – a much better, smarter Siri that doesn’t aim to replace your favorite agent (yet) – without being upset that it’s not something more.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed using Siri with Apple Notes, Reminders, HomeKit, and third-party apps such as AskPlay, Monologue, Alyx, MusicBox, and LookUp. I’ve found Siri AI to be best at quick, one-off interactions that perhaps involve a couple of follow-ups, but not anything much longer than that. If I realize that a question I have requires deeper research and more back-and-forth, that’s where I fall back to ChatGPT or the excellent Open Minis for iOS.

As I’ve outlined across this entire chapter, there are pros and cons everywhere with Siri AI. Put another way: Apple’s belated effort has paid off, but there’s still so much work to be done. For starters, I think it’s bewildering that Apple hasn’t been able to work with the EU and offer Siri AI in more regions and languages. The fact that Siri AI is still not multilingual is the single reason I still have a ChatGPT Voice shortcut on my Lock Screen, and I continue to believe that if Apple can’t swallow their pride and figure out how to build AI tools for the EU, they will only drive more users to competitors who have learned to work under European regulations.

Second, Siri AI still exhibits old behaviors such as slow performance, requests that time out, or “sorry, something went wrong” messages that aren’t helpful and do not inspire confidence in the product. There are new issues, too. I’ve discovered, for instance, that I can ask Siri to perform two things at the same time – such as setting a timer and turning on a light – but not three. If I ask for three things in the same question, the third one will be silently dropped. Indexing remains a mystery: sometimes I can find messages with Silvia or John from two years ago, but if I ask for something they texted me yesterday, Siri AI can’t find anything.

The system also gets confused with names of third-party apps, which remain my biggest question mark and will need more coverage as more apps add support for Siri AI and App Intents. I was using Focus, a timer app, which added support for Siri AI; every time I asked Siri to start a timer in the Focus app, it kept creating a timer labeled ‘Focus’ in the Clock app instead. The model and system orchestrator also appear to exhibit the typical tells of Gemini models, inherited through distillation. Apple’s Foundation models can often be lazy at tool calling and will consider a question answered after doing the bare minimum. In one test I did, I asked whether I had recently been on any trips, and since the Mercury Weather app exposes the ability to search for trips, Siri AI defaulted to Mercury Weather, which had no recent trips in my library. Only when I pushed back and added “you have to look in Photos too” did Siri AI realize that I’d indeed been on vacation two weeks before.

If you’ve ever used Gemini models with external integrations, this kind of behavior may sound familiar. And if you plan on using Siri AI with lots of apps on your device, expect to issue very detailed prompts to get the kind of result you want. Unlike large frontier models, Apple’s models aren’t able to infer user intent unless you are very clear about what you’re seeking.

Once I understood these limitations, I started having a considerably nicer experience with Siri AI, and I accepted that I shouldn’t expect it to be an alternative to ChatGPT Work or Hermes Agent. Instead, Siri AI is a great “quick answer assistant” that happens to work with native apps and – importantly – can be activated from anywhere and can see my screen. I’ve become a heavy user of on-screen awareness to capture all kinds of things in Notes; I like using Siri AI to quickly summarize articles in Safari; in general, I find myself context-switching between the app I’m using and ChatGPT less because Siri AI can give me a pretty good answer right there.

ChatGPT is for projects, Siri AI is for quick actions and fast answers. This is how I think about these AI products, and I’m happier now that I’m not trying to force Siri AI into being something it can’t be.

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Siri AI permeates iOS 27, and that’s a threat to OpenAI and the hundreds of millions of people using ChatGPT for free with GPT-5.5 Instant. I don’t think Apple’s Foundation models are as good as GPT-5.5 Instant, but Siri AI is the more ergonomic and integrated product. When the underlying chatbot and its world knowledge capabilities are good enough, and they can also be invoked via voice, text, the Camera app, context menus, or keyboard shortcuts, why would I open a siloed chatbot when I can use Siri AI and get a comparable answer more comfortably? If you’re a casual user of ChatGPT and do not pay for it, I think Siri AI can be a very compelling product that provides similar answers and, unlike OpenAI’s chatbot, integrates with the iPhone apps you already use. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that OpenAI is now following in Anthropic’s footsteps to monetize the business and enterprise markets rather than the consumer one.

At the same time, my concern is that we may be collectively assuming that “normal people” won’t see the differences between the capabilities of ChatGPT and Siri AI. In this industry, we have a tendency to sell “normal people” short and paint them as some perplexed bunch of occasional smartphone users who somehow passively accept any technology that is thrown at them. I strongly disagree with that. Maybe those people don’t care about ChatGPT Work, Codex, or Fable (yet?), but they can tell when an AI assistant is useful and when it’s not. People will compare the utility of ChatGPT to Siri AI, and I worry that Apple’s 1.0 product will feel like it’s too little, too late – especially since Siri AI will be launching in select regions and in English only.

In the AI scene, companies move fast and break things. Apple needs to move fast without breaking anything – not anymore, at least. That’s a tough challenge, but here we are.

iPadOS

How do you follow up one of the biggest and most important software updates ever released for the iPad? Unsurprisingly, if you’re Apple, you don’t. Unlike its predecessor and its complete rethinking of multitasking and windowing, iPadOS 27 is a smaller release that only introduces a handful of iPad-specific changes and is instead focused on improving performance, tweaking Liquid Glass, and matching the other features introduced on iOS 27, such as Siri AI.

There is very little in the way of iPad-only functionalities this year, and I don’t think that’s going to shock anyone who’s spent any number of years working on the iPad. Historically, we have gone multiple years between iPad-focused updates – and that was before something as groundbreaking as iPadOS 26. I’m not saying that Apple isn’t capable of shipping major updates year after year; I’m simply arguing that, at this point, we know that the iPad’s typical cadence – including its 18-month refresh cycle for hardware – doesn’t lend itself to major platform updates every September.

That’s not to say the journey toward making the iPad more like a laptop for professional users has stopped, despite the slower pace. The most relevant addition to iPadOS 27, in fact, is a reworked menu bar that behaves more like its counterpart on macOS now, in a couple of distinct ways. For starters, the name of the foreground app is now always shown in the top-left corner of the menu bar, right next to the date and time.

In addition to serving as a helpful visual aid for what is currently the active window in the foreground, the app’s name also acts as a pointer target to reveal the full menu bar on hover. Although this interaction was available before in iPadOS 26, I find hovering the pointer over the name of an app a more natural way of revealing the full menu bar than hovering over some empty space at the top and hoping it works.

But that’s not all: you can now make the entire menu bar always visible by default, just like on a Mac. To turn on this option, head over to Settings → Multitasking & Gestures → Automatically Show and Hide Menu Bar and disable the toggle. Now, the menu bar will always be displayed in its expanded state with the classic ‘File, Edit, etc.’ menu items.

And speaking of those menu items, icons next to menu labels are now used more sparingly than before. This has been a contentious topic in some parts of the Apple community for the past year, and I don’t have a particular opinion about this since the icons never bothered me that much. That said, I will agree that the menus now look cleaner and less visually busy. But I’ll let John analyze this change in more depth in his Golden Gate review, since much of this debate originated with longtime Mac users. Overall, I’m a fan of the always-visible, left-aligned menu bar because a) it’s more consistent with macOS and b) it makes it easier to discover commands nested inside menus.

There isn’t much else to discuss about iPadOS 27 beyond the menu bar and changes that I’ve already covered in the Design and Siri AI chapters. In terms of iPad-exclusive features, Visual Intelligence has now expanded to the iPad, and it lets you circle elements in screenshots with the Apple Pencil to look them up using Siri AI. It’s very nicely done, but I don’t really use it.

As everyone guessed months before the introduction of the iPhone Duo, the ability to resize iPhone apps running on the iPad was, in fact, a prelude to iOS apps expanding horizontally on a new form factor. Again, this one isn’t for me, since the apps I use have native iPad versions (essentially every iOS 27 app beta I tested was a Universal app with built-in iPad support). However, if you use an iPhone-only app on your iPad and that app updates for iOS 27, you’ll be able to resize it either on an iPad or in iPhone Mirroring mode on a Mac. Since I believe it’s more useful to do this on a Mac, I’ll let John cover this in his macOS Golden Gate review, too.

And to wrap up the list of iPad enhancements that are coming from macOS and will make more sense in the context of John’s review: the sidebars on iPad are no longer “floating” glass panels; they’re edge-to-edge again.

This was another heavily debated topic in the Mac community for the past year, and it’s actually a reversal I agree with. Sidebars are supposed to look edge-to-edge like this, and I never fully understood why Apple went with that look in iPadOS and macOS 26. I can’t wait to read where John lands on this one as a Mac user who actually didn’t hate macOS Tahoe as much as others.

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And that’s a wrap on iPad-only changes for this year. I continue to believe that iPadOS would benefit from a stronger Spotlight with the same integrations seen on macOS last year, a clipboard manager, proper support for clamshell mode (especially now that Control Center can be invoked on external displays, also new this year!), and – a bigger conversation – a more vibrant app ecosystem in the age of AI.

Clearly, though, this was not the year for another iPadOS milestone at Apple. And given the excellent work the company has put into system performance, Liquid Glass improvements, and the launch of Siri AI after several delays, I can’t really blame them for it.

Apps

Given the growing number of built-in Apple apps, their cross-platform nature, regional restrictions for certain features, and the simultaneous release of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 27, we think it’s best to split app coverage between my review and John’s. We debuted this approach two years ago; this year’s reviews will follow the same structure. It makes even more sense this year given Apple’s focus on fixes and smaller tweaks that encompass apps across its entire family of OSes.

This year, you’ll find the following apps covered in John’s upcoming review of macOS Golden Gate:

• Home
• Image Playground
• iPhone Mirroring
• Maps
• Passwords
• Podcasts
• Preview
• Sidecar
• Weather

I’ll be covering the rest here.

Calendar

Can you believe it? Fourteen years after Fantastical first brought natural language event creation to iOS, when LLMs were a distant dream, Apple’s Calendar app is getting support for “describing events” with natural language in iOS 27. Talk about a “finally” here.

When typing an event or reminder in the Calendar app, you’ll notice that some parts of the sentence will be highlighted in red to signify that they have been recognized by Apple Intelligence. By “some parts”, I mean the time of an event and the date, but only after you accept a suggestion for a recognized date above the keyboard. When an event gets parsed by AI, you’ll also see an Apple Intelligence symbol next to your typed sentence, and you’ll be able to tweak the event’s title in a separate field.

Unfortunately, despite being over a decade late to this feature, Apple’s take on natural language event creation is still inferior to Fantastical’s version from 2012. I’m actually astounded by how barebones this functionality is compared to the rest of the industry and other apps that were doing this before AI. Apple’s system does not support specifying calendars or any other metadata about an event. It only works automatically with event times, and if you want a date to be parsed, you need to manually accept a suggestion. I think a Shortcuts user with a decent prompt for the ‘Use Model’ action and the Cloud Pro model could do a better job than this parser.

For all these reasons, I’m very much let down by natural language event creation in iOS 27, and I hope Apple can ship a real version of this feature next year. They might as well have skipped this.

Camera

As happens every September, Apple likes to save some surprises for the Camera app very late in the beta cycle, so they can make new feature announcements coincide with new iPhone reveals. This year is no different: as part of the iPhone 18 Pro’s unveiling and its pro photography narrative, Apple also added customizable controls to the Camera app in the Release Candidate version of iOS 27.

To customize which controls are available for quick access in the Camera app, tap the grid button on the right side of the shutter button, then tap ‘Edit’ in the top-left corner of the viewfinder. Doing so will reveal a good-looking Liquid Glass panel with a list of controls that you can tap to add to the strip at the top of the viewfinder. You can also remove existing ones, or reset everything to the default state if you want to revert your changes.

Note that control customization is available for all modes of the Camera except for Siri and Panorama.

Clock

Morning alarm people, rejoice: in iOS 27, you can now set an independent volume level for alarms that is different from your ringtone volume or other system alerts and sounds.

(I used to have alarms in the morning, like a regular person. Then, the alarm became my dogs kissing my face because they want to eat. I prefer it.)

This feature is actually part of a bigger overhaul of volume levels with separate sliders that you can find in Settings → Sounds & Haptics. While everything used to be controlled by the ‘Ringtone & Alerts’ slider in iOS 26, iOS 27 has spun off ‘Alarms and Timers’ and ‘Alerts and System Sounds’ into their own categories, probably because nobody uses ringtones anymore.

By default, the new sections will have ‘Match Ringtone Volume’ enabled; if you turn it off, you’ll unlock a separate volume slider for those features.

I keep my iPhone permanently on mute, so this feature isn’t for me, but, as always, I am glad to see more customization everywhere.

Files

There are only two improvements to the Files app worth noting this year.

The first one is for iPad users: if you transfer large files to external drives on a regular basis, you should notice that those copies will be up to five times faster than in iPadOS 26. Apple claims that this change makes the Files app “just as fast as Finder on the Mac”, and my understanding is that these tests were conducted with APFS-formatted drives over a USB4 connection. I do not need to transfer large files from my iPad Pro to an external drive anymore (I now record podcasts on my Mac via Google Chrome and Riverside), so I’m looking forward to seeing what my friend Chris has to say about this.

Second: Files now supports AI-powered renaming of files and folders. I like this feature a lot. When you press ‘Rename’ on a file or folder and wait a couple of seconds, you’ll see some naming suggestions appear above the keyboard. Choose one, and the file or folder will be renamed instantly.

It’s interesting to observe how this feature works behind the scenes. The model powering this appears to be using a mix of file analysis and vision capabilities to suggest names. The model can suggest a cleaner title for a PDF by reading it, or a more descriptive name for a folder based on the items inside it, but it’ll also attempt to inspect an image with vision and offer a new name. For instance, I had a file in iCloud Drive called Codex.png for the Codex icon, and when I tried to rename it, the Files app offered “Blue Cloud” as a suggestion.

That’s not necessarily better than the actual filename I had, but it confirmed that the model is analyzing images before offering filename suggestions. Amusingly, when I tried to rename a photo of Liam and Noel Gallagher, the system came up with “Two People” as the name, but when I tried with a photo of my dog sleeping, it didn’t work.

For science, I also tried to prompt-inject this feature by leaving some instructions inside a text document I wanted to rename, and the model ignored them. Good job, Apple.

Find My

Continuing Apple’s streak of smaller additions throughout the OS this year, the Find My app has received a new option for location sharing and better support for pinpointing your location.

When sharing your location with someone, you can now choose a ‘Custom’ option that will bring up a date and time picker to share your location for an exact amount of time or until a specific date and time. This is great for conferences or vacations, for example, where you may want to share your location with other people but have it expire automatically at a specific time. It also works for quick sessions – the minimum duration is 15 minutes.

Additionally, in iOS 27, location sharing automatically picks the right device: your iPhone if it has an active phone number, or your Apple Watch if it’s a GPS + Cellular model.

Journal

I’ve long been the kind of person who wants to keep a journal, and I’ve never been able to stick to it. For a while now, I’ve thought that my problem is that I’m a writer by trade: after I spend all day writing and talking, I don’t want to sit down at the end of it and write some more about myself.

This is why the AI integrations in the Journal app for iOS and iPadOS 27 are especially interesting for someone like me. This year, you’ll find a new ‘Text’ icon above the keyboard (next to the smart journaling suggestions) that opens a panel of writing prompts. If you get stuck while journaling about your day or a particular activity, Apple Intelligence can help you keep going by asking questions related to what you’ve written so far. You can pick a question, which will be added to the journal entry in purple text, and then continue writing below it.

As with all generative text – and especially text generated by models that are not state-of-the-art in 2026 – some suggestions can be pretty good, others are kind of creepy, and some are just nonsensical. When I journaled about trying to finish this review in time, Apple Intelligence asked me if I felt stressed or how the rush would impact my day, and that was pretty good. But when I added a screenshot of my review workspace in Notion that had a pencil emoji, Apple Intelligence asked me if there was a deeper meaning behind it. And for another entry with separate photos of my dogs sleeping, Apple Intelligence – and I’m quoting this insanity below – asked:

What stories could emerge from the contrast between the two resting positions?

Buddy, they’re two pictures of my dogs sleeping. Don’t try so hard.

I’ll also note that journal entries now show timestamps in addition to dates, which I’m very surprised was not the case before.

Mail

I can’t believe I’m typing this, but Apple fixed Mail search in iOS 27 thanks to the new indexing behind Siri AI, and I’m now at the point where I may seriously consider switching to Apple Mail again. From my perspective, this is the biggest plot twist of the app story in iOS 27.

As part of this year’s focus on system-wide performance improvements and the new indexing that powers Spotlight and Siri AI, Apple completely re-engineered the Mail app’s architecture to support faster message loading and vastly improved search that finds relevant messages more quickly, with optional support for natural language queries. This has been a recurring frustration across my entire history of iOS reviews: Apple Mail’s search was never good enough. It was slow, it could never find what I was looking for, and as soon as AI integrations for Gmail started coming out two years ago, it seemed like I would be done with Apple Mail forever and use third-party services instead.

Lo and behold, they actually did it with iOS 27. The new indexing works and the search is great – it’s as simple as that. I’ve been able to find messages from 11 years ago in just a few seconds, and the app’s improved search suggestions do a nice job of highlighting the most relevant and recent messages from a specific contact while still showing you historical results from previous correspondence. And it is fast: on my iPhone 17 Pro, results from a decade ago appear as I type, and when I open an old message that I would assume is not in the system’s cache, it loads in less than two seconds.

Even nicer: you don’t have to phrase your search queries too precisely to find messages. Thanks to Mail’s new ranking system and Apple Intelligence, the system will know what you mean if you type a sentence such as “Email from Myke in 2013”. Trying to search with this query in iOS 26 would return no results, whereas iOS 27 immediately found my first email conversation with Myke from 13 years ago.

This all comes together nicely when you combine the improved indexing and ranking of Mail with Siri AI. A few days ago, I asked Siri to find all emails from Google Search Console in my inbox and archive them. In less than 10 seconds, Siri AI asked me to confirm that I wanted to archive 40 messages and displayed a visual snippet. That was it. This kind of request would have taken at least a minute with a frontier model that would have pinged a Gmail connector and reasoned through the steps; Apple’s hybrid orchestration system did it in under 10 seconds because the data had already been indexed on-device. I’ve had similar positive experiences with Mail and Siri AI when searching for specific threads, asking to summarize the latest message in a thread, and more. Alongside Notes and Reminders, Mail makes for one of the best demos of Siri AI to date.

The Apple Mail engineers responsible for these improvements honestly deserve a round of applause this year. You know me: when I dislike something, I don’t mince words, but when I like something, I’m not shy about that either. As things stand in iOS 27, I genuinely believe Apple went from having the worst search of any native email client on iPhone and iPad to the best, if you consider privacy, speed, on-device processing, and just how nice everything looks with Liquid Glass. A plot twist, indeed.

There are some other additions to the Mail app worth mentioning. App integrations are making their debut in the form of the same suggestions seen in Messages, which I will cover later. If you’ve enabled order tracking via Wallet, the integration in Mail will now show you links to manage or track an order in Safari in addition to opening it in Wallet.

Lastly, Apple Mail now also integrates with ‘Write with Siri’, and the system supports composing and editing messages in your own style based on context. I don’t like doing this personally, but I think it’ll be a popular feature with lots of users.

I did not expect a comeback story with Apple Mail in iOS 27. If you haven’t played with Apple’s email app in a while, now’s the time to take it for a spin again. Just let it index for a few days first.

Messages

Much to my surprise, the Messages app is having a relatively quiet year with iOS 27. As with the rest of the system, there are small improvements across the app, but there’s no single “big” feature in Messages for the first time in a while.

Let’s begin with Justin Bieber having mastered the art of filing feedback with Apple. Everyone knows that the best way to effect change is to complain loudly about an iOS feature on social media, which Bieber eloquently did last year when he voiced his keyboard dictation concerns on Instagram.

In iOS 27, you now have the option to hide the dictation button from the Messages text field so that you, or Mr. Bieber, won’t accidentally press it anymore. To do this, head over to Settings → Messages → Show in Text Field, and you’ll get options to show a button to record an audio message, start dictation, or – finally – ‘None’.

Not only is this a welcome tweak to the compose experience in iMessage, but we should all be relieved that Mr. Bieber won’t get to put John Ternus in “a rear naked choke hold”. The new Apple CEO lives to fight another day.

Moving on to non-threatening feature additions to iOS 27’s Messages app, Apple has now consolidated Tapback reactions in notifications. When multiple people in a group chat send the same reaction to a message, instead of getting separate alerts for them, the system will coalesce them in the same notification. It’s a small thing, but it’s nice to have.

Lastly, the Drawing app. This is a new app in the iMessage app drawer that lets you draw with native PaperKit tools (the same ones seen in Notes and Freeform, which third-party developers can now use too) to send drawings to your friends.

Why does this exist? Who at Apple is constantly sketching in iMessage and pushed for this?

And more importantly: why does Digital Touch also still exist?

Music

As the kids say these days, Apple Music continues to “mog” Spotify in the design department, and the iOS 27 version is so much better-looking than Spotify for iPhone, it’s not even funny anymore.

In iOS 27, Apple has redesigned artist pages with extended artwork whose color bleeds through the entire page, and put buttons to read an artist’s bio, play their top songs, and favorite them front and center. The result is dramatic and makes the old Music app feel like it was designed a decade ago.

I highly recommend taking a tour of different artist pages in Apple Music and looking at the enhanced art and motion effects the company has sprinkled throughout the catalog. No music streaming service looks as nice as Apple Music does, especially in iOS 27 – not to mention the app’s state-of-the-art real-time lyrics support, which continues to be one of my key reasons for not using Spotify.

Also new in iOS 27: there’s landscape support in the Now Playing screen on iPhone (we all know why this was added in a bunch of system apps this year) as well as improved transitions for AutoMix, which I don’t use because I’m too old for it.

The one blemish of the Music app in iOS 27 is, unfortunately, its Siri AI integration. I don’t know if the Music or Siri team is to blame here, but conversational music playback and search with Siri AI is a far cry from the outstanding experience of Apple Mail. While Siri AI can play specific albums or playlists in your library quite reliably, the same can’t be said for searching Apple Music or extracting information from the service’s catalog. When I asked to play some of Oasis’ ‘Live 25’ songs, Siri AI queued 25 songs from Oasis instead, and that tells you everything you need to know.

I hope to see much deeper integration between Apple Music and Siri AI in iOS 28.

Notes

While working on NotesCTL, my upcoming Apple Notes CLI for people and AI agents, I’ve been using the Notes app more as a capture system that sits in front of my intricate Notion workspace. I’ve long regarded the modern Notes app as one of the best of Apple’s built-in apps for iPhone and iPad, to the point where, over the summer, I even considered writing this entire review in Notes.

In iOS and iPadOS 27, in addition to excellent integration with Siri AI, Notes is getting some smaller improvements that, while not groundbreaking, will make power users happy. Perhaps they’ll even convince some of them to switch back from other note-taking apps.

Let’s start with the smaller things. In Notes’ action menu (open the copy and paste menu, then swipe left), you’ll find a new ‘Insert Divider Line’ option that, well, inserts a line in the current note.

If you’ve ever worked on longer notes containing multiple sections, you know that this is actually a nice thing to have. Interestingly, divider lines are also backward compatible with devices running iOS 26: on those devices, divider lines will render as three dashes (---).

The ability to deeplink to a specific note inside the Notes app, introduced in iOS 17, is expanding in iOS 27 with support for linking specific sections of a note as well. As always, you can create an internal link to a note either via the ‘Add Link’ menu or by typing >> to bring up the inline note-linking tool. After selecting a note in the quick menu, if the note contains sections (headings), you can hit / to drill down into the contents of the note and select a particular section you want to link to.

When creating section links from the full-blown ‘Add Link’ menu, you’ll find a dedicated ‘Link to Section’ page that lets you preview and navigate all sections contained within the note:

As with divider lines, these links cannot be created on iOS 26, but they are backward compatible with it. When you tap one of these links, you’ll be taken directly to the linked section of the destination note, which will be briefly highlighted on screen. This is a fantastic improvement to the Notes app, and it’ll make it possible for folks to create rich “table of contents” notes and Notion-like dashboards that cross-link to specific sections of other notes in the app. I love it.

Then, there’s the feature I did not expect to see in the Notes app, ever: integration with Markdown.

Support for the popular plain-text formatting standard has been implemented by Apple in a couple of different ways. You can export an entire note as Markdown from the share sheet. Doing this will convert every element of a note to Markdown, including tables and colored text, which makes Apple’s flavor of Markdown compatible with popular forks such as MultiMarkdown and GitHub Flavored Markdown. Even more interesting, however, is the fact that Apple Notes can export notes with attachments, which will be stored in an /Attachments subfolder and referenced within the Markdown text as an inline link. This is what I mean:

This is a solid decision: it means that you can now export a rich-text note from Apple Notes, grab the resulting folder, load it up in apps like iA Writer or Ulysses, and every reference to every attachment will load correctly. Even Apple Pencil drawings survive the Markdown export: they will be rendered as high-fidelity PNGs and stored in the Attachments folder. At this point, nothing is stopping you from creating a shortcut that takes a rich-text note from the Notes app, uploads images from the Attachments folder to a CDN, replaces the local references with a public HTTPS link, and gets that Markdown ready for publishing on a blog. I’m just saying.

I continue to be amazed by the progress that Apple has made in the Notes app in recent years. The app can now be used as a serious productivity powerhouse, which is why I’m building NotesCTL and look forward to releasing it soon.

I wouldn’t put it past Apple to copy Notion and add support for databases and properties to the Notes app. Stranger things have happened to this app, which is way more powerful than you’d expect given its humble origins nearly two decades ago.

Phone

The one addition to the Phone app this year is Call Context, which is another enhancement powered by Apple Intelligence. This feature is designed to surface relevant information about a contact or business while you’re on the phone with them; in my limited experience with this, it does work as advertised.

According to Apple, this feature will bring up reservation codes and confirmation numbers while you’re on a call with a business, but since I fundamentally dislike jumping on a phone call with hotels or airlines and prefer email or WhatsApp, I have not been able to test this.

Call Context did work when I was on the phone with a contact whose birthday it was. Mind you, the contact was my mom, so I didn’t really need a reminder. Regardless, I thought it was nice that the Phone app embedded a birthday popup and cute animation in the call screen, and I imagine this could be useful if you’re on a call with an acquaintance or a distant relative and want to pretend you remembered it was their birthday all along.

They’ll never know. Apple Intelligence will.

Photos

There are several additions to the Photos app this year, which can be categorized into three buckets that encapsulate iOS 27 as a whole: small quality-of-life features, performance improvements, and AI. Personally, I really like the first two categories, and I strongly dislike the AI features added to Photos; I find them pretty gross.

The Photos app is much faster than before, with new photos and videos loading up to 70% faster after they’ve been captured. I haven’t verified these claims with a stopwatch, but, anecdotally, the claim holds up. I took a lot of photos and videos this summer, and as soon as I opened the Photos app, the thumbnails were already there and I could open each item to view it in full screen immediately.

Apple’s focus on performance has also paid off in the search index, with up-to-date results that surface faster than before. To make search even more personal, you can now add custom keywords to photos and videos. To do this, swipe up on a photo to open the inspector, scroll to the bottom, and you’ll find a text field that lets you enter multi-word keywords. These keywords will show up in search results immediately, and they’re a nice way to find items with specific words that may not be supported by Apple’s search engine by default.

Speaking of photos showing up immediately: iOS 27 also brings a new option to prioritize iCloud sync for the rest of the day if you want to make sure that items upload to iCloud right away. To enable this, go to Collections, tap your profile picture at the top, then choose ‘Sync Immediately’ and set it to ‘For Today’. As Apple explains, this feature will affect performance and will be automatically disabled when Low Power Mode or Low Data Mode is turned on; in my experience, it’s been a great time-saver when working on this review to ensure that screenshots would sync across my devices as soon as I took them.

The smaller tweaks to Photos are my favorites this year. I have to start with one of the all-time greats returning to iOS: the Camera Roll is back. Well, sort of. In iOS 27, if you want to just see photos and videos you’ve taken and nothing else (no screenshots, no downloaded images from the web, etc.), you can press the filter button at the top of the screen and choose ‘Captured by Me’. Doing this will filter the main view of the Photos app to what it used to be: a beautiful grid of just your photos and videos.

This feature is awesome, but I’m bummed that it can’t be made a default view option of the app. I want Photos to always load like this; instead, when you quit the app and reopen it, you’ll have to re-apply the filter manually. Since this is one of the best “hidden” features of iOS 27, I feel pretty confident that lots of people will ask for it, and Apple will add a way to make the original Camera Roll the default view, in all its glory.

Another longstanding limitation of Photos that’s been addressed in iOS 27 is the inability to save frames of videos as images. How many times have you had to quickly and precisely take a screenshot of a video to freeze an exact frame from it? No more. In iOS 27, you can simply pause a video, press the ‘…’ button in the top-right corner, and choose ‘Save Video Frame as Photo’. Unlike screenshots, the resulting image will be saved at full resolution with metadata from the original video. This is exactly what I wanted Apple to do, and I have no notes.

And how often have you ended up taking a picture of your passport or driver’s license again because you knew you had one in Photos, but you couldn’t find it? This has also been solved in iOS 27 with the new ‘Identity Documents’ collection. This section aggregates all pictures of IDs you’ve taken over the years. It’s not perfect since iOS 27 recognized Volume 1 of my Berserk collection as a government ID but, hey, who hasn’t wished to be Guts every once in a while?

I’ve never been into star ratings, but they’ve found their way to Photos for iPhone and iPad. I’m fully aware that some people like to meticulously rate their music and photos, and because of that, I think Apple is doing the right thing in bringing the feature to the Photos app. After enabling this feature in the redesigned settings screen for Photos under Settings → Apps → Photos → View Options → Rating Controls, you’ll see a star badge appear at the top right of a photo when viewing it in full screen. You can tap that to give the photo a star rating, which can later be used as a filter in the main Library tab. Since I’d give all photos of my dogs five stars anyway, I wouldn’t know how to properly take advantage of this.

Another feature that I never use is shared albums (not to mention the shared library), but I should note that they’re getting some welcome enhancements in iOS 27. iCloud shared albums now support full-resolution sharing (imagine my surprise when I learned that it wasn’t the case already), and they can be set to expire after 30 days, giving other people a chance to get those photos after, say, a vacation, without cluttering your library forever.

Which brings me to the three Apple Intelligence features added to the Photos app: Spatial Reframing, Extend, and Clean Up. I find the first two kind of gross and useless (and I’ll explain why shortly); the third one already exists in iOS 26, but it’s been improved in iOS 27 with a ‘High Quality’ mode for detailed edits.

The new Clean Up, like the other AI features, can be accessed from the new Tools menu (the one with an Apple Intelligence logo) when viewing a photo. After you select it, you’ll see a loading bar while the model used by Clean Up is prepared. Clean Up defaults to an auto mode, which, as the name implies, automatically determines whether it should use a “fast” version of Clean Up for quick touch-ups or a “high quality” one for detailed work.

Objectively speaking, Apple’s claims that Clean Up has been overhauled in iOS 27 thanks to the new Foundation models hold up. When I tried to edit a photo of my dog and brushed over a flower vase in the background, iOS 26’s Clean Up removed the entire dresser the vase was on top of, and it left a smudgy mess in the picture. With the same gesture using iOS 27’s high-quality Clean Up, only the vase was removed.

See, I like Clean Up, and I use it frequently. So why don’t I like Spatial Reframing and Extend? Simple: while Clean Up is about touch-ups that remove small details of a photo without fundamentally altering its nature, I find generative features such as Apple’s Spatial Reframing and Extend, or what Google does on Pixel phones, to be slop generation machines for my memories.

Extend is a generative fill that uses a diffusion model to imagine pixels outside the bounds of an original photo. It just makes up what it “thinks” may have been around a subject in a photo, thereby altering a memory with whole scenery, structures, or objects that simply did not exist. Spatial Reframing is even stranger: it lets you adjust the composition and framing of a photo by twisting and rotating subjects, thus also imagining parts of an image that were never captured by you.

Although I use AI for so many things in my life, generative applications of it for images, music, creative writing, and, yes, memories aren’t areas I’m remotely interested in. I understand why Apple feels the pressure to add these options to their apps now given the competition and their marketing campaigns, but you won’t find a detailed explanation of these features in my review.

Reminders

The Reminders app – which is my primary task manager thanks to my own Reminders CLI – is getting some very minor updates in iOS 27.

The natural language creation I described in the Calendar section is also in Reminders, and it’s just as bad there. If you’re looking for an excellent natural language utility for fast task creation on iPhone and iPad, I can’t recommend Remind Me Faster enough.

There’s a redesigned inline metadata editor: when you tap a reminder, the old toolbar above the keyboard has been replaced by small buttons at the bottom of the selected item’s card, which include more options than before. Alas, there is still no shortcut to quickly change the list a reminder belongs to.

Lastly, Apple claims iOS 27 features improved organization for items in grocery lists, but since I use my iPhone in English and live in Italy, I haven’t been able to test this for myself. (If you use Reminders in English, groceries in other languages won’t auto-organize.)

Safari

Aside from technical improvements to WebKit, which are beyond the scope of this review, there are three additions to Safari for iOS and iPadOS 27: AI-powered tab organization, AI-powered extension creation, and the ability to get notified when content on a website changes.

I’ll start with the last one, which has never worked for me in my testing over the summer. With the new ‘Notify Me’ feature of Safari, you can describe a change you’d like Safari to look for on any particular webpage, and set a frequency: hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly. Once you’ve described the change and set a schedule, Safari will start monitoring the selected page, and, in theory, should notify you when the change is detected.

I’ve tried to test this feature with some blogs I follow by asking Safari to watch for “new articles posted”, and I’ve never been notified about any of them. I like the principle behind this addition: by using a combination of AI and Safari in the background, iOS can let you know if you’re missing out on any important new information added to, say, your kids’ school dashboard or a particular item that went on sale. I just hope Apple can improve the heuristics behind it so that it starts working for different types of websites. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

Next up is Apple Intelligence-powered tab organization into topics, which is…passable, but not great. The idea, once again, is sound: wouldn’t it be nice if AI could automatically tidy up your tabs and create topical tab groups for them? This feature works, but its results can be very generic, and can’t be improved or refined with additional prompting or custom instructions (a common refrain in the Apple Intelligence and Siri AI story this year).

For starters, you have to go hunt for this feature: in Safari’s tab overview, tap the filter button (the three horizontal lines), and you’ll see an option to ‘Organize Tabs’. Once enabled, Safari will start organizing related tabs into topics.

My issue with this feature is that it can be unreliable and it’s impossible to manage. Sometimes, I’m looking at a collection of tabs that are clearly related, and Safari just doesn’t organize them. There isn’t a button to ping Safari and tell it to organize those tabs, so you’re left staring at the Apple Intelligence abyss and wondering why it’s not working. Other times, tab organization does work, but the topics are so bland, they might as well not be there. If I’m opening 10 different MacStories tabs, with five about hardware and five about iOS, you’d think that Safari would organize them as “Hardware” and “iOS”, not throw all 10 of them into “MacStories”.

Since I’ve tested my fair share of AI browsers in the past year, I strongly believe that for AI-based tab grouping to be useful, it needs to be customizable. Let me assign rules or instructions to the browser! Without personalization, and with models that have small context windows and likely can’t process too much tab content at once, we’re left with pretty generic tab topics that aren’t that useful.

The last addition to Safari also marks Apple’s entry into the vibe-coding/“personal software” space for consumers with the ability to create your own Safari extension by describing it. Alas, like the other AI features in Safari, this has been very broken for me during the course of the iOS beta, to the point that – as of the release candidate – I was unable to create any extensions in Safari.

Again, the theory makes sense: you want to make a fun or productive tweak to Safari? Just describe the extension you want in natural language, and Safari will make it for you. In practice, I can’t comment on this feature since, every time I tried making an extension, Safari would say “Unable to create extension” and recommend other extensions from the App Store instead. I think it’s a nice touch that Apple, despite shipping what is essentially a little vibe-coding product to eschew the App Store altogether, is still suggesting third-party extensions, but we have to wonder how long that’s going to last if the future of computing involves the ability to just create any software you want, the moment you need it.

Anyway…that’s a topic for another time. For now, I hope Apple can get this feature working.

Shortcuts

I decided to close out this chapter with my favorite Apple app of all time, which also happens to be the one that is receiving the most substantial updates in iOS and iPadOS 27: Shortcuts.

Looking back at the past few years of Shortcuts coverage in my annual iOS reviews, I wouldn’t have guessed we’d end up here again. Year after year, I’ve used this part of the review to complain about the same thing: new actions added to Shortcuts were mostly about toggling settings and launching apps; there was very little in the app for those of us who have been building complex workflows in it since the Workflow days.

Shortcuts for iOS and iPadOS 27 is different. There are plenty of new actions this year, and a few of them – global variables, reading what’s on screen, Markdown in Notes – fix problems I’ve been working around for over a decade. More importantly, however, Shortcuts is once again paving the way for the future of productivity on Apple platforms, and I can’t even describe how happy it makes me to see Shortcuts thrive and expand as a tool that will democratize automation.

In a world where any workflow can now be automated with AI and agents, Shortcuts for iOS and iPadOS 27 isn’t bucking the trend: it’s embracing it with new ways to create shortcuts with natural language, actions to tap into Foundation models in the cloud, and deeper integration with Siri AI to easily trigger any of your shortcuts, no matter what you’re doing on your iPhone and iPad. Beyond that, Apple is turning the Shortcuts app into a codified, browsable library of all the capabilities of Siri AI that can be freely remixed by users.

There’s a lot to get through.

New Actions

Apple added a variety of actions to the Shortcuts app this year, addressing two features in particular that have been heavily requested in the automation community for years: the ability to store content in Shortcuts with optional global variables, and more flexible conditional blocks.

Store Content, Get Stored Content, and Delete Stored Content

Let’s start with the big one.

Shortcuts finally has a way to save a value and get it back the next time a shortcut runs. There are three new actions for this: ‘Store Content’ saves whatever you pass as input under a name you choose, ‘Get Stored Content’ retrieves it, and ‘Delete Stored Content’ removes it. This system has been elegantly designed so that it’s very intuitive to use, but at the same time flexible enough for power users:

• You can store all kinds of text and files with the new Storage actions.
• A stored value can be specific to the shortcut it belongs to, or it can be marked as “global”, meaning that all other shortcuts in your library can access it.
• At any point, you can open a shortcut’s inspector panel, then select Storage, and review the content stored in the shortcut and available globally. You can change the local or global nature of stored content later, too.

If you’ve never needed this, it may sound trivial. Believe me, as someone who has created thousands of shortcuts over the years, it’s not. Until now, if you wanted a shortcut to remember a secure credential, the last item you picked from a list, or whether it had already run today, you had to save a text file in iCloud Drive, rely on a note in the Notes app, or install Data Jar. I have entire groups of shortcuts in my library that are mostly file-management utilities just to remember a single setting. Over the years, I have created increasingly complex systems to store assets for my Apple Frames shortcut, only to eventually give up and use the MacStories CDN. Almost all of that can go away now thanks to the ability to store content inside shortcuts.

I say “almost” because, alas, it’s not possible to use the Storage actions as a distribution method across multiple users. If I design a new version of Apple Frames to store assets inside itself and share that shortcut with my readers, they won’t be able to retrieve assets stored in my iCloud account inside my personal Shortcuts storage container. This makes sense, and I don’t fault Apple for designing a system that is going to be optimized for individual users, but keep this in mind if you plan on sharing shortcuts that embed content you want other people to use in their own Shortcuts apps.

I should also stress the importance of the ‘Global Value’ toggle. When you turn it on, the stored content is saved in a special shared space in iCloud, so any shortcut on any of your devices can read from and write to it. This is Apple’s take on global variables, a concept that’s been requested by fellow advanced users of the Shortcuts app on several occasions over the years. With this system, it’s going to be possible to store things like secure credentials, templates, and image assets directly within Shortcuts – no more base64-encoded strings, at last.

Get What’s On Screen and Get Selected Text

As part of on-screen awareness in iOS 27, Apple has completely rebuilt the ‘Get What’s On Screen’ action with support for multiple data types and more flexible configuration options for visible apps.

With the updated action, you can read one of the following data items visible on screen:

• Contacts
• Email Addresses
• Files
• Images
• Mail
• Messages
• Notes
• Phone Numbers
• Postal Addresses
• Reminders
• Text
• URLs
• Voice Memos
• Webpages

Each of these variables does, of course, contain its own set of properties: inspect the variable for on-screen images, for example, and you can see whether it’s a screenshot or screen recording; get a reminder from the screen, and you can see the list it belongs to, or whether it contains images.

The possibilities of this new action are nearly endless: since it matches Siri’s on-screen awareness, you can do the same things as Siri AI, but programmatically and with controls designed by you. Even better, the action is fully compatible with iPads and the iPhone Duo: a toggle lets you choose whether you want to limit the scope to the visible app only or read from all visible apps.

There’s also another new action in this category: ‘Get Selected Text’. As the name implies, this action simply gets the text that is currently selected on screen – like the other action, it is best experienced when used via Siri and the Action button, or perhaps as a shortcut from the iPad’s Dock.

This action has no parameters. I’ve wanted this for years, mostly because it means text-processing shortcuts no longer have to go through the clipboard or the share sheet. It also means I can now make shortcuts that get Markdown text selected somewhere and publish that as an article on MacStories.

Add Item to List

Speaking of actions I’ve wanted for years: ‘Add Item to List’ can insert an item into an existing list variable at the beginning, the end, or a specific index.

If you’ve ever built a Repeat loop just to reconstruct a list with one extra item in the right position, you’ll understand why I’m mentioning such a basic action in the review.

Find VPNs and Get Current VPN

Tailscale and VPN users, this one’s for you.

The new ‘Find VPNs’ action returns your VPN configurations with different filters as optional parameters; ‘Get Current VPN’ tells you which one is active, if any. Combined with the existing ‘Set VPN’ action, you can now build a proper VPN menu shortcut or an automation that checks whether you’re already connected before doing something else.

Messages

The Messages app received a variety of actions this year that confirm how Apple is thinking about Shortcuts now: it needs to expose the same actions that are otherwise available in Siri AI. The new actions are:

• Delete Conversations
• Delete Messages
• Mark as Read
• Open Inbox
• Search in Messages
• Send Tapback

As you can see, these actions essentially reconstruct what you can do with Messages and Siri AI, but inside Shortcuts, with support for variables and user-defined flows. I especially like the ‘Send Tapback’ action, which reacts to a specific message with one of the six standard Tapbacks (Love, Like, Dislike, Laugh, Emphasize, and Question). To use this action effectively, you’ll have to pair it with the ‘Find Messages’ action, which needs to retrieve a variable for the specific message from the Messages app first.

Photos

As with Messages, Photos gained a bunch of new actions that match the capabilities of Siri AI:

• Auto Enhance Photo
• Delete Albums
• Favorite Photos
• Find Albums
• Hide Photos
• Open Photo

While I’ve never played around with Photos automation much, I’m very intrigued by the idea of scripting my albums in iOS 27.

Reminders

I’m very happy to see Reminders – which has been my task manager for almost a year at this point, a new record for me – receive some great new actions in iOS 27:

• Create Group
• Create Section
• Delete Groups
• Delete Lists
• Delete Sections
• Edit List

Sadly, the ‘New Reminder’ action still does not support adding a task to a specific section of a list – a strange omission given improved section support in other actions this year.

Updates to Existing Actions

In addition to new actions, I want to mention some updates to existing actions:

Notes: Markdown, at Last

As I mentioned before, Notes’ ‘Create Note’ and ‘Append to Note’ actions now support Markdown as text input. The ‘Append to Note’ action has also gained a ‘Section’ parameter to choose where in the note the text should go and an ‘Ignore Empty Lines’ option.

If you’ve built a journaling or logging shortcut around Notes – and I know a lot of you have – this replaces an entire category of workarounds.

If: Otherwise If

Eight years after Apple relaunched Workflow as Shortcuts, it has added support for “else if” branches inside conditional blocks.

Two years ago, I wrote about compound conditions making If blocks more readable; this is the other half that was missing from that redesign of conditionals. Programmers should obviously be familiar with the concept of “else if”, but if you’ve ever played around with advanced shortcuts, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about here. Instead of nesting a separate ‘If’ block inside an ‘Otherwise’ inside another ‘If’, you chain the conditions in a single block now. That’s really all there is to it, and this more elegant approach has also resulted in dramatically better performance for multi-condition flows in the Shortcuts editor.

My older shortcuts are full of indented conditionals that I’m now going to rebuild.

Use Model: Follow Up, Cloud Pro, and World Knowledge

The ‘Use Model’ action has gained a couple of new options, matching what is also possible in Siri AI. First, Cloud Pro is available as a model option for tasks that require deeper reasoning, although it does not let users set a specific reasoning level like third-party developers can in their apps.

Additionally, there’s a new ‘Use Broad World Knowledge’ toggle that lets the model answer by tapping into Apple’s proprietary world knowledge database. In my tests, flipping this switch and combining it with Cloud Pro for web searches has produced some pretty good, up-to-date results.

Maps: Avoid Highways and Avoid Tolls

The ‘Get Travel Time’ action now has ‘Avoid Highways’ and ‘Avoid Tolls’ toggles, so your “time to leave” shortcut can finally match how you drive.

Extract Text from Image: Text, Lists, and Tables

‘Extract Text from Image’ has a new parameter with three options: Text, Lists, and Tables.

The last two mean you can point the action at a photo of a list or a table and get structured output instead of a flat block of text. This matches the vision capabilities of Siri AI in Visual Intelligence, and I’m especially keen to combine these with adding structured content to Apple Notes.

Scan QR or Barcode: Extract Mode

‘Scan QR or Barcode’ has two modes now: Scan opens the camera like before; Extract reads a code from an image you pass in as input.

Yes, this means you no longer have to point your iPhone at your own screen to read a QR code in a screenshot. I’ve done that more times than I’d like to admit.

Safari: Create Tab Group

The ‘Create Tab Group’ action got a ‘Contents’ parameter that accepts URLs or existing tabs, so you can create and populate a tab group with a single action.

New Reminder: Urgent

While it didn’t receive support for sections, ‘New Reminder’ did get an ‘Urgent’ toggle, matching the modern urgency feature from the Reminders app last year.

Get Network Details: Ethernet

‘Get Network Details’ received an Ethernet option alongside Wi-Fi and cellular, with nine fields:

• Interface Name
• IPv4 Address
• IPv6 Address
• Subnet Mask
• Router IP
• Is Connected
• Link Speed
• Ethernet Standard
• Hardware MAC Address

Set Volume

Matching what is now possible in the Clock app, the ‘Set Volume’ action now lets you automate volume levels for alarms and timers, or alerts and system sounds, separately from media and ringtone.

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Below, I’m compiled a collection of 10 shortcuts that demonstrate some of the new capabilities in iOS 27.

You can find all shortcuts in a new iOS 27 category of the MacStories Shortcuts Archive. 20 more shortcuts will be released for Club MacStories members later this week.

Automations

Alongside the plethora of new actions we’re getting in Shortcuts this year, my other favorite change is the complete redesign of automations: they’re no longer a separate section of the app, but instead appear as “special actions” at the very top of a shortcut, which means that you can also share shortcuts that contain automations with other users. Finally.

You can add an automation to a shortcut either via natural language (more on this in the next section), or by opening the action library in the editor and selecting the new ‘Automation’ category. Doing this will let you browse the catalog of automation triggers, and you can tap one to add it to the shortcut, where it’ll always be placed at the top, ready to be configured.

Because automation triggers are actions, though, it also means something else: we can now stack multiple automations in the same shortcut! Power users will love this: it lets us run the same shortcut when any of several conditions is met, instead of creating a separate trigger for each one, as was the case in iOS 26.

Apple has designed the sharing flow thoughtfully: to avoid the risk of someone else installing a shortcut from the web that contains an automation they don’t know about, automations will be disabled by default (and visibly grayed out) on the receiver’s end upon installation. To enable an automation, you’ll have to flip its main toggle at the top of a shortcut, and then it’ll be able to run with configuration options previously set by the creator of the shortcut.

You can still browse all shortcuts that contain automations in a dedicated Automations page of the app, which also lets you quickly turn them on or off, filter them, and see the ones that you haven’t finished setting up.

As a longtime Shortcuts creator, I’m incredibly happy to see automations become something I can share directly with my readers instead of being a fiddly feature I need to explain how to set up manually. This is an excellent change, and having automations live in the editor also makes them easier to configure and tweak.

In addition to unified automations, there are also new automation types to choose from. With the new Keyboard trigger, you can configure a shortcut to run when any keyboard is connected to or disconnected from your device. This could be particularly handy with an iPad, for instance, if you want to switch to specific Home Screens or Focus modes when the Magic Keyboard is detached.

There’s also a Notification trigger. With this automation, you can let a shortcut run when you receive a notification from a specific app and optionally filter the title, subtitle, or message contained in the notification itself. You can even process a dedicated ‘Notification’ magic variable in the editor for further checks against its body text, time-sensitive nature, or date.

While I’m the type of person who tries to reduce incoming notifications as much as possible, I’ll admit that I see lots of potential for fun use cases of this automation trigger, such as flashing your HomeKit lights red when a food delivery is nearby, unlocking the front door when your spouse’s car pulls into the garage, and more.

Describe a Shortcut

I saved the most important feature of the Shortcuts app this year for last: you can now describe shortcuts with natural language, and AI will make them for you, in seconds, right inside Shortcuts.

I knew that this was going to happen soon when I released my Shortcuts Playground plugin for Codex and Claude earlier this year, and you may think that I’m upset that Apple “sherlocked” me with this feature. So, let me state this very clearly:

I’m ecstatic that Apple is shipping this feature in Shortcuts for free, and that they’ve made it so easy to use. The biggest barrier to entry for the Shortcuts app has always been teaching people how to use the editor and connect actions together: with the ability to describe a shortcut and will it into existence in a few seconds, that barrier has been destroyed. Apple has done an excellent job making it fast and reliable at generating simple- to medium-complexity shortcuts.

See, that’s why I’m not upset: Apple’s natural language shortcut creation cannot generate highly complex shortcuts that span hundreds of actions, or go off to the web to research an API and then make a shortcut for it. My Shortcuts Playground plugin can literally make and remix Apple Frames (I made version 4.0 of the shortcut with it!); Apple’s feature will stop short of generating anything that involves reasoning for longer than 30 seconds. There is still plenty of space in this field for an agent-agnostic, long-running plugin such as Shortcuts Playground to exist. (In fact, I’ll have a major announcement about it soon.)

And here’s another thing: a simpler, faster, more reliable version of Shortcuts Playground made by Apple is exactly what I wanted and needed as a user. The ‘Describe a Shortcut’ feature can one-shot all kinds of shortcuts in 15 seconds or so. It can pre-fill all supported parameters in all supported actions. It can pre-scan parameters during the generation phase to make sure they’re valid (such as checking whether a note exists if you ask to make a shortcut to append to a specific note). It can configure all supported toggles in each action for you. It’s also beautifully designed with a gorgeous Liquid Glass animation, and it supports editing shortcuts with natural language by describing further changes to them.

In case it is not clear enough: Describe a Shortcut is a marvel of engineering and, possibly, the most impressive demo of Foundation models to date. It’s no surprise that Apple believes in this feature so strongly that it’s now the default screen when you create a new shortcut in the app.

I’ve been testing this feature all summer, and while it’s not capable of making shortcuts for third-party apps (I assume this will be coming in the future) or third-party web APIs not in its knowledge base, it is an excellent starting point for most users of the Shortcuts app. I once called Shortcuts a bicycle for the mind; the ability to turn an idea into a working automation is the ultimate expression of that philosophy. This is what computers should do: they should help us spend less time managing the computer itself, and more time doing what we actually like.

Go play around with ‘Describe a Shortcut’, test its limits, and have fun with it. I bet it’s going to teach you some things you didn’t know about Shortcuts, and, most importantly, it’ll help you do things with your iPhone and iPad you didn’t think were possible.

Everything Else

As is always the case with new versions of iOS and iPadOS, changes in the operating systems run the gamut from tentpole features to quality-of-life improvements and smaller tweaks that you may not notice at first.

Let’s take a look at everything else that’s new in iOS and iPadOS 27.

AirPods

In iOS 27, Apple completely revamped the AirPods management page in Settings, going from a bland, long list of toggles and sub-menus to a more colorful page that neatly organizes everything into richer menus:

As you can see, a volume slider was added underneath the different listening modes supported by compatible AirPods, but that’s not all. When selecting ‘Adaptive’ mode in the top slider, iOS 27 will reveal new options to make its intensity lighter (leaning more toward Transparency mode) or stronger (toward Noise Cancellation). I’m glad Apple did this: I never fully understood Adaptive mode, and I’ve long preferred to toggle between Transparency and Noise Cancellation because I felt like Adaptive was suppressing too much background noise for my taste. I’ve set the new slider between Transparency and Adaptive and, so far, it’s working well.

I’ve never been into equalizers myself, but iOS 27 also introduces custom EQ support for AirPods Pro 3, AirPods 4 and later, and AirPods Max 2. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to test this since the option to install AirPods beta firmware never appeared on my devices.

Cellular

As part of iOS 27’s focus on performance improvements across the board, Apple brought a couple of useful changes to how the system handles cellular and Wi-Fi connections behind the scenes.

First, iOS 27 intelligently transitions between Wi-Fi and cellular as you move around, keeping your data connection working without you having to go into Control Center to toggle Wi-Fi off.

I know firsthand that this works because I used to run into this very problem every single day. You see, in the 10 meters that separate our apartment’s front door from the elevator on our floor, my iPhone would stay connected to Wi-Fi in the apartment, but I couldn’t actually do anything because data wouldn’t work. Like every flawed human being, I must take advantage of the 30 seconds that I spend waiting for the elevator to open social media and doomscroll. iOS 27 fixes this: as soon as I walk out of the house, the system detects a weak connection, intelligently re-routes it to cellular, and I can get to my timeline while I mindlessly wait for the elevator to arrive. Maybe I shouldn’t have wished for Apple to fix this? In any case, the feature works well – and it’s one of those things that you’ll stop noticing and take for granted until you go back and experience what iOS 26 used to be.

Second, there’s a new design for notifications that tell you about Wi-Fi connections that aren’t working. I hope you never get this.

Keyboard

There are always keyboard-related updates in this chapter of the review, and iOS 27 does not break tradition. I mentioned this before in the Siri AI chapter, but it bears repeating here: the larger, more powerful AFM 3 Core Advanced on-device model (which is only supported on modern devices) enables a faster, more reliable dictation experience.

You probably won’t notice the differences at first since the UI looks the same, but in my experience, the new dictation is way more accurate than the previous one. As someone who uses an iPhone in English with an Italian accent, I’ve noticed that iOS 27 transcribes certain words more accurately than iOS 26, such as “wide”, which iOS 26 heard as “why” in the comparison above.

As you start using iOS 27, you’ll also notice two more additions to the keyboard experience. First, there’s system-wide automatic proofreading that checks whatever you’ve typed and underlines suggestions in blue. This is not autocorrect: proofreading checks for correctly typed words that do not fit in the context of a sentence – such as “this is a tests”, where the word “tests” would be underlined. You can accept suggestions by tapping on them.

Second, when you copy something to the clipboard – whether it’s some text, a link, or an image – the next time you select a text field, you’ll see a suggestion above the keyboard to instantly paste what you just copied.

It’s a small tweak, but it’s one of those time-saving features that Apple drops out of nowhere every year and that become instant classics. I think millions of people will love this enhancement to the keyboard.

And More…

More features? More features. Let’s bring this home:

There is a new Mac-like recovery mode. As reported by 9to5Mac, there’s a brand new recovery flow in iOS 27 that resembles the page you get on macOS when you need to recover your device. If you see this screen, something’s gone wrong.

A new design for Apple Pay on the web. The Apple Pay sheet has a new look when you’re buying something on the web. I like how it handles multiple associated cards because it makes it clearer how to switch between them.

Notifications go sideways. For reasons that, in hindsight, make more sense because of the iPhone Duo, notification banners now appear with a new animation that swoops in from the top-left corner of the screen. This is not just cosmetic or optimized for the Duo, though: the animation also serves to reinforce that you can swipe from the top-left corner to open Notification Center, as opposed to swiping from the center, which opens Siri AI now.

Gotta go fast. Most reviews of iOS and iPadOS 27 (is anyone else still writing them?) will probably only focus on this part of the experience, and highlight it at the beginning of their narrative. I saved it for the end, because I think it’s important to see what iOS 27 does differently before appreciating how much faster it makes everything.

There’s no way around it: iOS 27 is the most reliable, fastest, smoothest version of iOS Apple has ever released. From smoother unlocks and scrolling Home Screen pages to better performance under heavy load (thanks to a new CPU scheduler, a part of the OS Apple has been improving a lot lately) and 30% faster app launches (courtesy of preloading app data), there is virtually no part of iOS 27 that hasn’t been affected by Apple’s focus on performance this year.

You have to see it to believe it. Which is why I’d recommend you go to Settings, load up Software Update, and upgrade from iOS 26 as quickly as you can.

Conclusion

A question loomed large over Apple ahead of WWDC three months ago:

Will they deliver on AI and make good on the new Siri they promised two years ago and never shipped?

Three months later, we have our answer: they did, and the new Siri AI actually works and is useful. This is not to say that it is perfect. Siri AI is a limited rollout in a single language, with no availability in the EU; it’s based on Foundation models that are still behind the current state of frontier AI; and it’s predicated upon the assumption that third-party developers will put in the work to support the architecture Siri AI requires.

Despite these limitations, it’s undeniable that Apple’s entry into the AI assistant space feels like someone finally designed a chatbot for how normal people use their phones. As a power user, sure, I would have liked to see more features and options. But I also have to remember that starting from advanced users is not how Apple operates. Siri AI is an assistant designed around the iPhone and iPad, built to take advantage of their app ecosystem. It could have been a chatbot bolted onto the OS, and perhaps some would have been happy with it. But Apple went in a different direction.

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In my career at MacStories, I’ve never witnessed a topic as divisive as AI and what it’s doing to the tech industry right now. We have been critical of certain aspects of AI over the years, and we’ve championed others that are fundamentally changing what we do on our computers – and what the computer is supposed to do for us. In a world of hot takes and extremist positions around this topic, I choose to remain pragmatic and optimistic. And I choose to believe that there’s still room for nuanced takes on AI that put our readers and developers first, so we can explain what’s useful about it, and what’s possible to build with it.

With that in mind, this is how I plan to explore the potential of Siri AI over the next few years. Apple’s new assistant is making a strong debut in iOS 27, powered by excellent integrations with native apps, a solid balance of speed and privacy, and a pervasive intelligence that is only made possible by Apple’s interplay of hardware and software. Time will tell if millions of consumers will find Siri AI to be a compelling alternative to ChatGPT, but I think Apple is making something else very clear with iOS 27, the iPhone 18 Pro, and the iPhone Duo:

Artificial intelligence is here to stay on Apple platforms, and it’s going to reshape our relationship with the company’s devices. You can disagree with it, but you can’t ignore it. I want to understand Siri AI, because we need more companies that give a damn about design, app developers, and privacy in the AI world.

Because, after all, I still love writing about a company that, against all odds, is hungry and foolish enough to try something new.

Credits

My annual iOS and iPadOS reviews are a labor of passion, curiosity, and – to an extent – sheer endurance. I do them because I love everything about the process. The review wouldn’t have been possible without the support from the following people people and dogs:

• My girlfriend Silvia, for her wisdom, unending support, love, suggestions, and patience. This review wouldn’t be possible without you. I love you.
• Zelda and Ginger, my two dogs and the love of my life. Thank you for making me happier every day.
• John Voorhees, a friend and tireless business partner. Running MacStories with you is more fun and interesting every day.
• Granola, the sponsor of this review.
• Lachlan Campbell, for their invaluable, detailed notes and suggestions.
• Myke Hurley
• Stephen Hackett
• Notion, Codex, Claude, Shareshot, Shortcuts, Open Minis, oMLX, HandBrake, Unread, and Superhuman – the tools behind the making of this review.
• Every app developer who sent me betas during the summer.
• Designers and engineers at Apple, who always make reviewing iOS and iPadOS each summer fun.
• Every Club MacStories, Club MacStories+, and Club Premier member, for supporting us directly in everything we do.
• Our Discord members, for always pushing me to do my best.

And finally, every MacStories reader, for allowing me to do what I love every single day. Thank you.

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